


Provider

by yourcountenance



Category: Sindar - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 19:57:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3741691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourcountenance/pseuds/yourcountenance





	Provider

 

~ ONE ~

 

“Jasten,” my mistress said as I attached the wires to the stainless-steel ports spread across her pale brown scalp. “I’ve been called to lead an important mission for the Provider. I might be gone longer than usual. You’ll be fine by yourself for a few days, won’t you?”

She was almost fully reclined in her sensanet chair,looking up at me, waiting for my affirmation. 

Her request threw me off balance. It was very unusual for her to call me by name. It was unusual for her to call me anything. It was only ever the two of us in the apartment. 

Of course I would be fine.I’d been caring for missionaries for more than eight years now - since I was a small child. I’d been her caretaker for three years. I’d connected her to the sensanet hundreds of times. In a few minutes I’d watch her soul leave her body, migrating through the wires to the other side. She would be with the Great Provider and I would be standing by to care for the flesh she left behind. This was my calling. What reason had I given her to doubt my abilities?

I tucked my head down to hide my confusion and went back to connecting the wires. I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard her at first, but she’d said my name, and she was already chuckling at the expression on my face. 

“You’re right. Of course you’ll be fine It’s my own anxieties talking. What does the Provider ask us to give?” 

My reply was automatic. 

“Whatever we can.”  

“Whatever we can,” she echoed, closing her eyes and settling in her chair as I leaned over to attach the wires to the crown of her head. “No more, no less. We’re all just flesh and bones; messy kluges decaying at top speed. And the Provider, in his infinite data, understands that there are limits to how much we can give.”

I wanted to reassure my mistress that she would be fine too, that I would be here to take care of her no matter how long she was gone. But I didn’t reassure her. She was my mistress. I was responsible for her body but she was responsible for both our souls. 

“Those called to missionary work are always given the faith to accept the risks they face,” she said, settling into her chair. She’d said this before. Never in the chair, though. We didn’t usually talk in these moments where we prepared her to leave her body. 

Was she worried about her body? Had I done something to make her wary of leaving it? It seemed unlikely. Like all the missionaries I’d known, Sindar had very little care for her body. ‘A temporary and unstable data processor,’ she would say with disdain, ‘constantly degrading.’Like all missionaries, my Mistress dreamed of the eternal life and longed to achieve the purity she needed to shed her body once and for all. My mistress was righteous — everyone agreed that she could expect an instant welcome into the sweet hereafter of the Provider’s network. 

“What has He called you to do?” I asked, my fingers working to find the ends of the wires and attach them. Best redirect her to our work. Her eyes burned at my question and her shoulders relaxed as if she were already inside the net and immersed in the Provider’s light. 

She reached up and patted my working hand with her frail fingers. "I will be leading a charge of the faithful. We will overwhelm a vice merchant's stall of horrors. He gets Silicon Valley Hacks to put ports into the brains of small children he buys from desperate parents and he undercuts the Hollywood stables by allowing his clients to...” 

Her eyes were full of threat for just a second but it passed and I knew it wasn’t menace directed at me because she was looking right through me. “I’m sorry,” she finally muttered, and blinked. “I don't mean to upset you further." She withdrew her hand from mine with a small pat and rolled her shoulders, filling her silence with minute pops and crackles. 

I’d figured it had to be a brothel attack the second I’d seen the fire in her eyes. My mistress specialized in sensanet sex crime. It wasn’t a fact she’d told me herself, but she was celebrated in the church as a great liberator of lost souls: myself included. She knew that I’d worked in a Los Angeles brothel just as I knew that she’d been the missionary to hack my pimp’s servers, destroy his business, and send him to prison. 

It’s not often that the shadow of our shared history hovers tangibly above us like this. Most of the time she teaches me about the sensanet as if it’s an amazing foreign country she’s planning to take me to when I’m old enough. She might know that I’ve never actually been on the sensanet – my medical records show that I’m on the list for corrective port surgery to fix the botched install the brothel hacks did when I was a kid. She gets a pitying look in her eye when she stares at my messed up ports for too long, but she would never say anything. The church guarantees every one of its saved children a new birth, free of whatever sins they’ve been forced to live before. Everyone who sees my torn up scalp with its protruding metal bits knows I’m a brothel kid. Not even the other ex-brothel kids are comfortable bringing it up. I imagine we all just await the day we can get back online and leave the very last remnants of ourselves behind where no one but our caretakers can see them. 

“I will be fine, mistress,” I reminded her, because she was still staring up at my ports with discomfort. 

Most brothels buy or steal children, install cheap, off-brand ports in their brains, and pimp them out over the sensanet for any number of uses. It’s not what you’re probably thinking. It’s not all about sex. Mostly, brothels rent our processing power. We’re just as good as a computer, but we’re a hell of a lot more secure. Our data can’t be stolen, it can be subpoenaed, it can’t be stored and then compromised later (though brothel owners try this trick all the time). Some brothels sell us to cybercriminals looking to attack high security targets. Increasingly, cyber security systems are detecting and blocking computer programs with elaborate bio-gates. Until the robots really can replicate a human brain, cyborgs are the interim solution. We’re close enough to human to get through, but we’re still programmable. 

Sometimes, I don’t know how often, clients really are after a mindfuck. There are millions of ways to wallow in sexual depravity on the internet and on the sensanet. But some people can’t settle for non-human sex. They can’t fool themselves into thinking the bots and the pleasure programs are real. They crave not the sexual response, but the feeling of being known by another human person. Intimacy. They want someone they can drop all pretences with - they come to let their guards down, to destroy the walls that keep us isolated from one another and lonely. These walls used to be made of skin but skin was breeched a long time ago. Now it’s all about the ports. And for the price, our guardians let clients pour themselves into our minds, where we can build no barriers, and play around inside us until their time is up. Many people do this work. Brothel kids are at a premium, though. Our blankness makes it tolerable. We know you in your full complexity, good and bad, but when it comes to us there is not much *to* know. We are indistinct and un-distracting. We do not have to fake pleasure. We couldn’t, even if we wanted to. Pleasure is not necessarily a relevant metric for intimacy.  

My brothel specialized in mindfucks. But I wasn’t one of those true unfortunates sold into a stable by addict parents or picked up off the street like a stray dog. I was legally bred in a stable for brothel work. If it hadn’t been for the brothels I’d never have been born and if it hadn’t been for my suffering I’d never have been saved. It’s hard to imagine my life turning out any other way. But brothels upset my mistress. She has dedicated her entire life to eradicating them. I am one of thousands of children she has freed, and I know many of them feel like she gave them their lives back. 

My mistress shifted her head so that I could access the ports on the other side of her head. “Of course you’ll be fine,” she said. “You have a calling.” 

“So do you, mistress.” 

“I hope so. In many cases I arrive far, far too late to do any good. But I give what I can, Jasten. You know that. I bring the ones I can save back into the Provider’s healing light. It’s not enough, but I’ll do it as long as I am called to. If I can make the slightest bit of difference, ease the smallest bit of suffering, then it’s worth any risk I can take. I’ll give what I can until I have nothing left.” 

She stared unblinking up at the ceiling as the words poured out of her, like she was trying to placate some invisible person above us. She started to say more but stopped herself mid syllable, mouth open, waiting. Like she expected the Provider or an elder or someone to chime in and deny her commitment to her mission. She appealed to me with a glance, like she was my colleague all of a sudden, and not my mistress, and needed to confess her doubts to me.  

"Will you make it a Gomorrah?" I asked. Best speak tactics, remind her of her position. This was how I could help. Not with names and personal history and confessions, but by demonstrating my faith in her strategic genius. The business about her asking me if I’d be fine, I’d worked out, had to do with informing me as delicately as possible that I would need to attend to the private business of her corporeal body for as many days as it took for her to wage her virtual crusade. 

And that was more than enough closeness. 

She smiled up at me, a thin quiet smile. "No, not a Gomorrah. The code that runs this stall is nothing special; I could destroy it in an hour and it would take the merchant less than a day to copy and paste it together again from the open source library.” 

I should know this, her smile said. She was patronizing me by explaining it to me in such simple terms. But her tone was to be expected and I didn’t take offence. She was my patron. Besides being my teacher and my guardian, she was the expert on our church’s conversion tactics. I was only her apprentice, still studying for the missionary entrance exams I could take when I turned eighteen. 

“A tower of Babel, then?” I asked.  

“A good idea. Hack into his stall, find his thought-conversion software, and re-install it to change the basic output language.” 

She shifted in her sensanet chair, getting comfortable. She seemed self-assured again but I waited for the tension to leave her face before I went back to my work. 

She kept outlining protocols, so I started reattaching the wires. “Many missionaries find it easier to just garble people’s thoughts so that they can no longer communicate while inside the merchant’s stall, but I’ve always liked the operations that hack the thought-conversion software itself. If you know what you’re doing, you can translate all of that that corrosive hate and sin and lust into pure love for the Provider. It’s an elegant suggestion either way.” 

She cocked her head up my way looking for a response and popping two wires loose, but I just adjusted my stance and leaned further over to reach the port by her left ear. Seeming to miss her eye contact by accident.  

“A Babel job is hard to do in the limited time you have before the system’s defenses boot you,” she added in a softer voice. “But I was looking over your code the other day and you’ve become very fast. You might make it your specialty." 

“Really?” I stammered. My coding skills were nothing compared to hers. I was still coding with my fingers in languages so out of date they still required a keyboard.  

“Most missionaries will only use a Tower of Babel to block an unusually terrible propaganda site.” She ignored my blush as I stood straight to affix the wires to her right side.“It is obscene the lengths the lost masses will go to hide from the Provider online. And sometimes it's not about the message itself but about finding the right language to convey the message in tones that will be truly heard.”

Her cybernetics were starting to initialize now that I’d connected more than half of the wires and she was shivering slightly as she settled into the chair. She smoothed her loose black cotton shirt and wrapped her thin sweater around her waist.

“This vice merchant doesn't require nearly so much effort. I've planned a simple flood." 

A Denial of Service attack then. No wonder she was on edge. The concept was simple but the logistics were draining. She would round up the faithful in the thousands and drive them into the merchant’s stall over and over, in catastrophic waves, for at least a couple of days until his walls crashed and his hardware fried. 

My mistress had participated in these missions hundreds of times, popping in and out between waves to eat and sleep. As the leader she might have to stay in the sensanet for the entire period. Much longer than usual, as she’d said. Minimum three days, maybe as long as a week.

“Will you need…?” I didn't know how to phrase this. We didn't discuss this. We discussed the Provider, and she recommended software manuals and bible apps for me to work through, and then she was inside the net. We never talked about how I took care of her body, performing all of the physical conditioning therapies and personal care she needed. The videos I’d been linked to during my training had said never to bring up such matters unless I was specifically invited to. And. “I’ll be fine,” I finished in a rush. “It’ll be fine, I mean. I have everything under control. You can trust me.” 

“Oh, I doubt anything exciting will happen. Not on this side, anyway. Attacks like this are mostly about endurance. For missionaries and for caretakers. Go about your routine and don’t neglect your studies. It’ll be three days at the most. His defenses really are pitiful.” 

I connected the final, thicker cord that patched into her brainstem through a port at the back of her neck. She reached up again to pat my hand, which is when I noticed that I'd forgotten to withdraw it. 

She pulled my hand down to her shoulder. "Don't worry about me." She was already booting up the system that would send the sensanet coursing through the wires into her own brain's circuits. "The Provider takes care of me," she said, her hand falling away from mine to dangle off the side of the chair.  

I sighed, confident she couldn’t hear me anymore. "Sure. The Provider takes care of you.” Not me. I’m just the apprentice who catheterizes you and spoon feeds you because you’re too cheap to order IV bags. 

I am prone to ungrateful thoughts in times of stress. It’s times like this that I wish I could truly pray to the Provider. It’s one thing to have faith in the church, but it’s difficult to believe that the Provider has a plan when it’s all just data you can’t load into your ports and see for yourself.  

When I’m eighteen and able to know the Provider’s light, I’ll regret all the years I spent grousing to myself. I regret them even as I’m living them. When I am finally able to join my mistress online I won’t care at all that the food we eat here is bland compared to the fresh oranges and spicy rice our guardians used to make at the brothel. I won’t care that I can’t leave our one bedroom apartment and shop until my mistress comes back to unlock the door. I shouldn’t care about these things now, I know. Only data survives, and I believe that. But it would be nice not to have to stretch our food quite so far all the time. Whatever the church pays missionaries, it isn’t enough to offset our astronomical bandwidth costs. How my mistress could afford to lead a flood when she could barely afford food for herself was not a question for me to ask. 

But the extra work we had to do we did in service to the Provider, and that made it worthwhile. And I had gotten good at rationing food and repairing worn out equipment and clothes. I would manage three days just as easily as I’d managed the last time she’d been arrested at a log-in protest for cyborg rights and gotten stuck for thirty-seven hours in a holding program. 

I pulled her dangling hand up and laid her fingers into the touch-sensitive pads in the armrest. She would need these to navigate her way between the sensanet, the public internet, and the church's private network. I let out an even louder sigh, letting it devolve into a growly kind of moan. I was annoyed that she would be gone for three days. I was relieved. 

 

 

~ TWO ~

 

In the kitchen I pulled out what was left of the week's groceries. The bread was gone but I had a large bag of flour leftover from last month, an apple, and a bag of crushed almond pieces, and I had made bread before with much less. As the dough was rising I saw to my mistress's needs, wiping the sweat from her forehead and checking her vitals. 

She shifted and muttered something I couldn’t understand as I disrobed her to set up her catheter and I paused, waiting for her to submerge back into the sensanet. 

When I was a child the church elders who salvaged me from the stable told me that to access the sensanet was to free your soul from its prison and go places your body could never follow. I doubt that this is as true as the elders require it to be, dogmatically. My first master had his ‘jacks’ (as we called them in the States) installed when he was in his mid-fifties. He always said his mind was too old and afraid to leave his body fully behind in case it should decide to die while he was gone, and that that was why he never fully lost feeling in his limbs when he was ‘jacked in’.

 He could still hear me and give me instructions with half of his brain in the world and half of his brain on the higher planes of the sensanet. He couldn’t participate in the more complicated rituals of the church, but his calling was to train young caretakers, not coordinate the Provider’s rites, purify the net, or minister to lost souls.  

My mistress had her ports installed when she was seventeen - back before they’d passed the law criminalizing port surgeries on minors. And she spends more time inside the net than out. She leads the church’s most daring missions and turns down promotion offers to the wardship all the time.She doesn’t care about advancement or status. The Provider has called her to save the souls for whom the sensanet is a depraved, lawless abyss of sin and exploitation. She is the holiest person I have ever known. 

And even she can't leave her body behind entirely while she’s online. I suppose I’m the only one who knows this. I suppose every caretaker knows this and doesn’t say. The body remains, but it is rarely as inert as it looks on the training videos. Sindar’s soul might be elsewhere but she can’t stop herself from moaning and tensing when I do something she doesn't like, any more than she can stop herself from shivering when she's cold. 

I picked up the catheter to try again once her breathing evened. When my shoulder brushed her inner thigh she kicked out reflexively and struck my ear with her socked foot. She cursed me – her body cursed a tremendous amount when she was on the net – but it was in Swedish, her body’s native language. I couldn’t understand Swedish, but an online translator app and my three years as her caretaker had equipped me with a comprehensive grounding in Swedish profanity. 

I ducked a second kick and decided to hold her down and get it over with quickly. Better to get the things you liked the least out of the way first so that the rest would come easy, my first guardian Angelo had always told us back at the stable. Although no one in the church would appreciate my saying this, my brothel upbringing had taught me plenty of skills that proved useful in my current calling as a caretaker. I pinned my mistress’s legs to the side with my shoulders, finished the job, rearranged her, tucked the blanket back, and went to finish making my breakfast. 

The bread was aromatic and not nearly as dry as I thought it would be once I dug out some packets of blackberry jam to spread on it. I ate it by the window where I could get a nice view of the courtyard. The sky was its brightest winter blue and the sun glared off the freshly-fallen snow to fill the world with light. I watched the morning’s procession of commuters make their way to the transit stand with their heads bare and their faces upturned to the sun’s warmth, and it filled me with two minutes of bitter resentment. On the rare days when I could think of some pretext to bring us out of our apartment – errands in town usually – it was always gray or drizzling. The sun shone maybe three or four days a month at most here in the valley. And it was always on days when my mistress was online and the doors to the apartment were locked shut and the alarms were armed to protect us from any foreign menace while we were in our prone state. 

I waved to Mathias, the boy who lived in the apartment across from mine. He spoke sign language and attended a virtual school for the deaf by video conference, so like me he was also home a lot during the day. We chatted online and I’d picked up a bit of sign language off the web, so with the help of a lot of gesturing we could talk. He signed hello to me and told me a funny story about his mother. I didn’t understand all the signs but it was easy to laugh along anyway. Mathias’s impersonation of his mother’s pretentious friends were rude, and they always cheered me up. 

It was rare that I could reciprocate with a funny story of my own. There wasn’t much I could safely say about Sindar, my mistress, beyond the lie that she was my mother and that I was home schooled. So when he asked about my mom I said she was travelling again and changed the subject to my friend’s dog instead. The black lab perked up and barked towards me on his master’s command. We joked about all the ways Benoit, the dog, might expand his current skills as a service dog and “speak” for the deaf the way dogs were supposed to “see” for the blind.And soon all the commuters were gone and the Mathias’s mother was touching his shoulder and pointing him towards his terminal. 

I sat down at my workstation to begin my own studies. My workspace took up one corner of the apartment’s main room. My tactile computer terminal was near the apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows, blocking the little alcove with the sensanet chair, our servers, and my bed, from any neighbour’s view. 

 I entered my ID into the church’s system, ready to finish up the neurocoding exercises I'd started yesterday, but the internet connection was slow. 

It wasn't uncommon for the lights to dim while Sindar was in the sensanet, even with the wind and solar boosters we used and the extra power we syphoned from the building’s grid to run Sindar's sensanet terminal. But our internet and sensanet connections were always fast – Sindar never exactly admitted it outright, but she’d hinted that she’d hacked our account with the telecom conglomerate to ensure that our traffic was not only unmonitored but that it received the highest possible priority. 

I got frustrated waiting for my page to load, and after the third attempt I rose to investigate the nest of wires near Sindar's computer, figuring it had to be a problem with our hardware. 

I glanced at the chair but didn’t touch anything. My mistress’s custom-made chair was so flawlessly designed and so reliable that I was afraid to change anything for fear of de-tuning it. 

The internet and the sensanet are separate systems with separate connections, but Sindar ran them through a single router connected to the chair so that she could access the web while she was inside the net. As much as I wanted to reboot the modem it wouldn't be safe to do it until she was offline. And perhaps the problem was simply that she was using it right now as part of her mission and hogging the bandwidth. I got her a drink of water. I made myself some tea. I waited. 

When nothing would load twenty minutes later, I gave up.I took my mistress's Bible down from the shelf. It was the one book she kept a paper copy of in the apartment. I read the psalms aloud to myself. I was working on a program that would bridge sensanet systems with the analog telephone systems the vice merchants still used. The psalm would join any call made to or from a vice merchant’s number, playing so loud that neither party would be able to hear the other. No damage to the phones, no damage to the lines, we would simply be louder. 

The elders were actively looking to exert their control beyond just the sensanet, to make sure the vice merchants were well and truly crushed and that the Silicon Valley hacks and stable owners were brought to account for their defiling the Provider’s realms. I wasn’t a missionary yet, but I knew I would be called to help when the time came.  

I hummed a psalm, imagined Angelo answering his phone a thousand times a day and hearing my voice singing about the Provider’s righteous grace, imagined him collapsing to the floor, blood spurting out his ears. I imagined gathering all of his new boys around me and leading them to the Provider, and then returning to crush Angelo under our feet until he was unrecognizable. And I had to remind myself that my feet would not be involved at all - that I would be in a chair like Sindar's, using the purest parts of myself, guided by the Provider. And that we would only be pulping Angelo’s mind. Burning him from the inside but leaving his body just as it has always been. Strong and comforting and always orange scented. The idea of a pulped Angelo frightened me, so I knew I was on the path to righteousness. I closed my eyes to get it over with, this thought that I would load myself into the sensanet one day, and I missed Sindar's first scream because I thought it was in my own mind. 

 

~ THREE ~

 

Sindar gurgled but I heard it this time and shut the book and rushed to her side. Her feet thrashed in the chair, which wasn't normal when I wasn’t actively disturbing her. I crouched over her, afraid to touch her, and got a foot to the ear for my concern. 

I backed away and tried to decide whether I needed to intervene or wait it out, whatever ‘it’ turned out to be.  

She was shuddering. The metal stands of the chair vibrated against the floor. The videos could not have been clearer on how dangerous it was to disconnect someone from the sensanet without their consent and foreknowledge. If the software wasn’t working to cushion the snapback, the brain might permanently lose connection to all of the body's sensory and motor organs, leaving the user trapped inside. Even with the most expensive software systems disconnects like that was reported to happen to someone once every 70 000 times. Once every 40,000 times if you were using off-brand or outdated software. All of the members of the church are prepared to take the risk of disconnecting. My mistress and I had never discussed it openly, but she made sure I knew where she kept the little bottle of potassium chloride. 

"Mistress?" I tried, from my position three feet distant. She writhed. I tried again. Her name, this time. "Sindar?”

She went limp. It wasn't as reassuring as it might have been under better circumstances. I looked over at her terminal but I had never quite gotten the hang of the complicated medical readouts. The lines and waves always just looked like lines and waves to me. All just traffic I wouldn’t learn to navigate until I started studying for my missionary exams next year. And even if I did understand any of it, there wasn’t anything I could do. Without the internet I couldn’t contact the church and without the church there would be no help. The work we did for the church was illegal. No one knew we were here, no one knew who we were. If we had a phone, which we didn’t, there would be no one to call — no one who wouldn't take one look at the chair and immediately throw Sindar in prison, mistaking her for just another godless hacker, a self-abuser, a terrorist, it didn't matter which. And that would be before the inevitable child endangerment and human trafficking charges they would bring against her when they figured out who and what I was. 

I ran back over to my terminal, desperate to connect with someone from the church's help site. Was there any bandwidth left at all? Was it possible that she was simply responding to something happening to her on the inside? That it was some sort of biofeedback, perhaps some new defense software inferring with the terminal's command to suppress Sindar's motor functions? All and any of these things were possible but the page refused to load and how was I expected to verify anything? 

Sindar was whimpering now, her limbs still shaking. And this wasn't happening at all like it had when my old guardian had ascended. When he'd lost his connection to his body there had been no outward sign. For days he didn’t move, didn’t speak, until finally almost a week later he didn’t breathe.

"Sindar." I stood behind her head and touched her shoulder. Flicked her. "Sindar, tell me what to do. Are you there?" She reached for me with trembling, stupid fingers that lunged out in front of her, grabbing at the air. 

The training videos advise that if anything should go wrong, a caregiver should always leave the sister or brother hooked up to the sensanet. The soul is a pattern of data that yearns to be with the Provider eternally. To die inside the net is holy. The digital hereafter is something every believer dreams of. This is what the videos say. This is what I have every reason to think Sindar believes. But then her fumbling hand found my wrist and gripped it so hard I almost swore myself, and and after that I couldn’t convince myself that she had been disconnected. More heretically, I couldn’t convince myself that she’d be content to join the Provider before her work was done. 

I am the one who performs the maintenance on the servers while Sindar rests between shifts on the net. I know which buttons will reboot the system. I even know that the software is built to buffer Sindar's consciousness in the datasphere for up to two hours in the case of a power failure or technical difficulty. 

I gripped her spasming hand and held it to the control panel. "Hold on, I'm going to extract you. Be ready for a snapback."

She may have nodded, the shaking was too pronounced to be certain. I reset the modem and the terminal with my own clumsy fingers and held my breath in the awful silence of the powered-down machines.  

 

~ FOUR ~

 

I could hear the sound of my own breathing - or, rather, I could hear the long silences between my breaths. I had never reset a modem with a believer logged into the sensanet before. Not only did it turn off the chair, it turned off all the power in the apartment and probably shook the building's power grid. Sindar made no sound. 

"Please… God in Heaven," I prayed, using the wrong words in my panic. There was another long silence in which I noticed that Sindar's eyes were open and wet. She'd stopped seizing, like I’d pulled the plug on her too. But when I touched her she was as tense as a rubber band stretched just to the point of snapping. 

“Provider!” I fumbled for the right words. “I can't believe in you or worship you in the way that you require. But she believes, in you and she worships you more than anyone in the church that I've met, and she is not a bad person, she's not a bad person at all. If you can hear me at all out here, through microphones, or wires, or the modem, or the stupid jacks they put in my head, please! Keep her buffered until I can fix this!”

Sindar sat bolt upright in her bed, bloodshot eyes fixed on me, screens coming back to life in frantic, angled lines and waves. I gasped in shock first, then relief, and looked up at the monitors. The vitals’ screen was certainly not normal, even I could tell that much. The spikes that measured brain activity were erratic and far too close together and the waves that measured Sindar's heart rate and blood pressure were way too flat. But all around the apartment electrical devices were turning back on, even the ones that hadn't been on before the reset. 

And Sindar was still staring at me. 

"Mistress," I began, my deference coming to me easily in my relief that she hadn't been lost. I opened my mouth to apologize. 

"Zero, one hundred thousand, ten, eleven hundred, eleven thousand and one, one hundred and ten, one hundred and ten, eleven thousand one hundred and one, one million one thousand and one…” I stared into her eyes but she didn’t stop. She didn’t even blink. She recited faster than I could hear, very low, taking only half a breath between larger and larger numbers. “…One hundred ten billion one hundred million one thousand and ten,” she said in a final exhale. She shook her head slightly but even through that her eyes stayed wide open. She reached a trembling hand to her scalp and recoiled when she touched the first wire. She looked back up to me in fear and supplication. 

"Of course," I flushed, of course she would want to disconnect as quickly as possible. I was at her side in two steps, reaching into the wires as quickly as I could when she protested again, reciting astronomical numbers at me. Sindar shrieked when I moved to unplug the first wire from her left temple and that was a clear enough signal. It took me far too long to understand. I rushed back to my computer terminal. 

"Binary. You're speaking to me in binary. That's..." it was terrifying. And actually very Sindar-like. She had immense fondness for antiquated computer languages. They still ran most basic functions, she reasoned when I resisted adding binary coding to my own studies. If you know binary you know the language which made the first hulking room full of plastic parts into a machine capable of conversing with man, she’d said portentously. 

I couldn't hope to translate the binary without the online binary portal I was using to learn. And nothing on my terminal was loading. The connection was completely gone now. It hadn’t come back at all after the reset. 

"There was a problem," I told her dumbly, staring down at her. "I reset the system." She took a breath, but it was only to fuel the next series of numbers. Her look was un-mistakeably pleading, though. She needed my help. She'd probably gotten stuck halfway back from the sensanet when the power cut out, leaving part of herself online and part of her in her body. And I was wasting valuable seconds now, risking a permanent, irreparable separation. I didn't bother consulting Sindar on the course of action. This was not my mistress, after all, this was some revenant. 

I thrust the body back down onto the table, throwing my weight against her shoulders as she resisted. And I pressed the button in the chair’s armrest that would launch her back in. She tensed under me and groaned before going still again. I gave her ten seconds, counted out in slow breaths, and I pulled her finger to the button that would trigger a manual log off request.

"Sindar,” I said into her right ear as I wrapped my own finger around her hand to press the button. “Come back." 

She woke with a harsh intake of breath and rose against my arms. But she blinked. And her vital signs levelled off into their conventional-looking gibberish. 

"Boy, why are you lying on top of me?" 

 

 

~ FIVE ~

 

With my ear against her chest I could hear her heart beat at its normal flutter and it was reassuring. She was lax and pliant and soft now. My mistress. My guardian. My charge.

"You're crying, min pojke." Her hand was in my hair, drawing my face up towards hers. She had called me boy only a handful of times – first when she'd collected me from the wards and later whenever she perceived that I lacked decorum and needed correction.

I always scowled when she said it – in the first year because I had been a boy of twelve and very much liked to forget it, and in recent years because I had come to know that Sindar was not so terribly old herself. Perhaps ten or eleven years older than me, but no more. Not old enough to lord her age over me as if she were my mother when I was the one who spent my days feeding her and wiping drool from her chin. 

But I wasn't irritated to hear her call me boy just then. She muttered something else in Swedish, eyes heavy-lidded and calm, fingers from her right hand smoothing my hair, fingers from her left hand stroking my back. “Adrenaline. It will pass. Breathe slowly and tell me how everything went to hell.” 

I stared up into her eyes then. She didn't quite sound like my mistress. Her voice was graver and far more accented than usual. Then again I’d never heard her say ‘hell’ before. Maybe that was always how she said it? 

She was lying still and limp, with me sprawled on top of her, and she wasn't making a move to distance herself from me or correct me or remind me to see to the wires that had to itch at her synapses. We’d never been this close while she was conscious. I buried my face in her light shirt, which reeked of her fevered sweat, and realized with dismay that the soft mound I was trying to hide my face behind was one of her breasts. I scrambled off of her immediately, shame burning my cheeks, and started backing away. She rolled her eyes, another gesture I'd never seen her make.

“Whatever it was, boy, everything seems to be fine now. I am fine.” She twisted her fingers into her own hair then and started to disconnect the wires. I realized my expression must betray my shock. "Now. What are you doing here? Did Christian send you over? Against my specific wishes? Hmm?" 

"Mistress..." 

"Mistress? Who are you.... oh. No." She covered her mouth with her hand. "You're a catamite." 

I felt sick then but also angry, and wicked, and confused. "I'm your caretaker." 

“No. No, I don't have a caretaker. I would never! I can’t believe the elders still even tolerate that sick sect of after all the trouble it brought the church. After all the work we’ve done to clean up the net, do the elders think the Provider and the authorities won’t see the shit they get up to in the flesh?” She put her hands up and tangled her fingers in the wires, tugging. “No. I would never sink to their level.”

"You did," I spat, "you do." And my eyes rested on the tubes snaking from between her legs, unable to look her in the eye. "You took me on when I was sold with Murray's estate.” 

"Murray, of course. Horunge, you’re the one he kept, then. Number-.” 

“-Jasten. Murray named me Jasten.” 

“Right.” She nodded. “I helped burn your stable down. You’re the one they let that scumbagLogano experiment on - the one with the rat’s nest for a brain. The reports on your surgery gave me nightmares for a fucking week. Christ, what in fuck are you doing here?" 

“Stop it!” I snarled. "You’re wrong!”

“Pojke,” she began, like she was gearing up to have the difficult conversation with me about the place I’d come from. 

“No, I mean you came back wrong! My mistress would never speak as you do!”

She rolled her eyes again. “Well thank God for small mercies.”

"She would never blaspheme." 

She was poking gingerly at her catheter now like she didn't actually remember how to remove one. "What the hell did you do to me while I was online?" 

"I … reset you," I sputtered. It was my turn to look away. "You started screaming, and the monitors went crazy, and I didn't know what else to do so I did a hard reset." 

Both her eyebrows went up. “That's...” 

“Our internet connection wasn’t working. It sounded like you were dying.” 

“I disconnected, you mean.” 

“I don’t know! You came back after the reset. Sort of. But you were speaking in binary, so I logged you back in and out. Quickly. I… I didn’t know what else to do…” 

“That's completely against protocol. That's so completely against everything you've been taught, if you are what you say you are. What kind of caretaker risks a hard reset during a disconnect?” 

She pulled herself free of the last wires and started testing out her sore limbs one at a time, like she was taking stock so she could come across the room and strike me. 

I fled to my terminal to check the connection. Still nothing. I jabbed at the refresh icons, rebooted the terminal. Nothing. 

Behind me, Sindar let out a sharp gasp of pain, a short laugh, and a volley of profanity. I wanted to hide but the apartment wasn’t large enough. I should have followed my training. I should have gotten the bottle of potassium chloride out of the cabinet and done exactly what the videos instructed me to do. But it was too late for that now. 

"The internet went out first," I muttered, explaining because I was fairly sure I was now the room's single proficient hacker, and it seemed important that the abomination know how and why she was damned. “Sindar's soul is too large to store in her chair's hard drive. A clean, compressed copy gets stored and buffered in the datasphere automatically during log off and log in, to prevent code degradation. And when I reset the chair without the internet it deleted the incomplete copy of Sindar’s soul in your cybernetics, but it couldn’t restore from the datasphere. No internet plus a power outage means you're not...”

“Well yes,” she rolled her eyes. “Clearly I've been deprogrammed. I have memories missing, but I'm not a total trögis.” She sounded annoyed with me for not reaching the conclusion sooner. She sighed, staring down again at her catheter. “Now get me out of this fucking thing and I'll help you get your fucking mistress back.” 

 

~SIX~

 

It took a lot more cursing to get me over to her chair and by the time I was there to help she had figured out how to extricate herself more or less on her own. I couldn't see how getting her out of the chair would help us get my mistress, but I kept the thought to myself. 

She could barely stand. I had to help her with every one of the fifteen steps to her bedroom. She had no compunctions about using me as her own personal crutch, even though she'd called me catamite with that look of terror, disgust, and pity you'd give a baby born with a genetic defect and left out in the street to make its own way. 

"Does she touch you, your mistress?" 

I tried my best to hide my affront but her question stopped me in my tracks. She had to grip my shoulder for balance to keep from falling over herself. "No one's forcing *you* to touch me." 

“That's a no, then? Please let it be a no.” I pulled her forward and reminded myself that this was only temporary. “It’s not that serving the church isn’t a noble thing to do, pojke. But there’s time for that when you’re older. You should be with a family. In a foundling home. Not locked up in here by yourself servicing a musty old machine.” 

"I was too sick," I protested. It was what Murray, my first master, had always told people. Too sick for the surgery to have my dysfunctional ports removed, so too sick to go to the orphanages with the rest of the saved brothel kids. It might have been true, but if it was true I never received any treatment for my sickness. And it wasn't like Murray had kept his plans for my future in the church a secret. He'd been proud of how quickly I learned to code. My love for the Provider had come so easily to me that it was clear I would have a calling when I was old enough to log on. “My ports don’t work like other people’s.” 

She nodded with a knowing look, like I was making an understatement. She'd seen my file. I had never cared to look at my file. I wouldn't understand the medical jargon anyway. I'd focused on learning how to code and I'd kept as far away from the biomedical research as possible. I knew more than I ever wanted to know about what other people's brains looked and felt like. Sometimes I even thought I could remember what other peoples' brains smelled and tasted like. I didn't want to know any more than I already did. 

"What are you?” I asked “If you're not my miss..." I couldn't finish it. The word ‘mistress’ felt crude after the questions she’d just asked. And I didn’t feel like watching her flinch away from me again.  

She caught my meaning though. "It's a bit hard to explain. I'm the part of Sindar's brain she can't use while she's on the net. All the pathways and connections she formed before she got the port surgery and the neural upgrades – all that stuff is me. Most of the things that happened to her after that she processed through the new hardware. I'm the leftover bits her cybernetics couldn’t code. The 'org' part of the cyborg." 

She let herself fall onto my mistress' narrow bed and sighed while I tried to decide whether to believe her. I'd watched all the videos and none of them had ever discussed the possibility that a person could be deprogrammed this way. That a person could return to the self they were before their surgery – to their original self. If that was true then why hadn’t Murray told me about it? 

Sindar frowned when she caught the look on my face. "Oh, pojke, no. I'm sorry." She took my hand in both of hers. Her hands were cold and bony. "That's why they ban port surgery for anyone under eighteen. My brain had years to develop these pathways independent of the implants." 

I pulled my hand out of hers and turned so that she wouldn't see my cheeks redden. I didn't know whether to be sad or angry. She had said it in such a kind way that she'd almost sounded like my mistress again, although my mistress would never have acknowledged that sometimes I wished I could have chosen not to be a cyborg. 

"Having these old IRL pathways makes logging onto the sensanet very difficult and painful, actually. Which is why the chair gradually dampens them the more time you spend logged on. I'd been keeping them stimulated while I was offline but I suppose I must have stopped at some point. You can’t imagine the migraines I used to get, and the synaesthesia can drive you insane if you’re not careful. I thought I would be the kind of missionary who could have a foot in both worlds but I..." 

"You do the Provider's work online. You give everything you can to him. Everything." 

"Yes, well, I'll take your word for it. Now – forgive me for relying on your service for just a little bit longer but I will need muscle conditioners, stimulants, and my gun. Unless I've gone completely off my game, my internet connection should have been well protected. The only way it would get shut off is if someone were deliberately trying to kill me or deprogram me." 

"But." 

"Muscle conditioners, stimulants, and my gun. The people who did this might be working in the internet provider's headquarters, in which case I'm just fucked, but it's at least four times more likely that they're in the building, and that they'll be coming up here to collect me once my soul has timed out on the datasphere server" 

 

~ SEVEN ~

 

I found the muscle conditioning pills in the drawer of Sindar's nightstand. Most elders use them to cope with snapback and I knew where Sindar kept hers. 

“I don't know what you mean by 'stimulants' but I know she doesn't have a gun.”

Sindar laughed and swallowed the pill I handed her. “Coke. Ephedrin. Meth. Whatever's handy. Just need a little wind in my sails. And I suppose I should be relieved that you don't know where I keep my gun." 

"My mistress doesn't..." 

“I did. Mostly coke. The church cleaned me up but I used to keep a stash in that vase over by the window for emergencies. My gun is probably in...” she scanned the room and narrowed her eyes. “Shit, I don't remember,” she laughed. I turned away – she was an ugly, loud laugher and I didn’t want to see it. I spotted the vase – I hadn’t ever noticed it before but there it was peeking out from behind the curtain.  

Drugs shouldn't have come as a surprise – you didn't get expensive port surgery and spend hours and hours on the sensanet if you weren't already comfortable tampering with your brain chemistry. I still didn't want to look inside the vase for confirmation though. She bolted up from the bed before I could work up my nerve and strode past me to a chest of drawers.She plunged a hand into the top drawer, spilling socks and underwear over onto the floor. 

A second later she muttered something triumphant in Swedish and I heard a series of loud metal clicks. I turned, resigned, and grabbed the vase off the window sill. Sure enough there was a tiny bag of white powder beneath the silk flowers. Although the flowers were covered in dust, the package itself seemed clean and new. 

"Do you know how to use this, pojke?" 

I turned back and she was holding the small pistol towards me, handle first. It was small and silver with just a bit of black on the grip. It was a real gun, from the look of it, with ballistics rather than sonic pulses judging by the barrel. I wanted to hold it in my hand so much that I didn't trust myself. I demurred and shook my head and tried to sneak the white package into my pocket but Sindar reached past me and snatched it from my fingers. She shoved the gun into my hand to replace the contraband and grinned at me like we’d come to some sort of deal. 

She closed my fingers around the firm, cool handle with both her hands. "You don’t have to know how to fire it. Just point it at people. It's more about the threat than the actual shooting anyway. But it is loaded, so do be careful, caretaker.”

She had pocketed the drugs and was rifling through the drawers again, pulling out tight brown pants and one of Sindar's long, loose blouses. "Give a girl some privacy," she chuckled, holding the clothes in her hands. I stood getting used to the weight of the gun in my hands and trying to figure out the safest way to hold it. "I know you're used to seeing her naked, but I'm not used to you seeing me naked, so go guard the door or something, okay?" 

I did as she asked even though I knew from the way she wouldn't meet my eye that it had nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with the drugs she was going to do. I wondered vaguely if I should try to stop her – to protect my mistress's body from this earlier biological incarnation of herself that lived a life of sin. I was supposed to protect her body while she was in the chair. How were my responsibilities to her any different now that her body was walking and talking without her?  

Before I could make up my mind, she opened the bedroom door, fully dressed, looking thin and bright. She was moving far more deliberately now. I could see that she was still in pain but she had a focus and control she hadn't had before. 

She paced the hallway three times while I stood staring dumbly at the door. "They shut off the internet and then they cut the power?” 

“Well,” I tried to think. “The internet was unresponsive but it was still there. And the chair’s alarms didn’t go. But you screamed like you were in pain and then I reset the system and then the power died but it came back on, and…” 

“Don’t worry, this has to have been an outside strike. You don’t get deprogrammed by accident. Someone’s paid big money to achieve this result. There are only a handful of people who even know how to pull it off.” 

“Who?” 

“I’m going to regret this, but tell me anyway. What year is it?” 

I told her, and she swore in Swedish for a bit and paced. “Seven years. Who the hell knows. Maybe this happens all the time nowadays. Maybe they’ve figured out how to monetize it and they’re holding your mistress for ransom. Or maybe this is just Interpol’s way of saying ‘come out with your hands up.’”

She careened onto my bed, which was tucked into the corner of the main room’s alcove near her chair, and groaned. I stood by my terminal, hitting refresh, praying silently for the internet to come back so I could call an elder for help. 

Sindar bolted up just as dramatically as she’d flopped down. “What was I doing today? Am I still a missionary?” 

“Yes,” I nodded, relieved. “You were leading a DOS attack against a vice stall.”

She snorted and ran a hand across her bristly hair. "Fucking rich, that. What else?"

"You said you'd be gone for days. You were worried about it. Could they have attacked you? The vice merchants?"

She shook her head. “A single stall owner ordering a massive hit against one missionary leading a DOS attack? Makes no sense. They could rebuild a hundred stables for what it cost to deprogram me and it wouldn’t do any good. If it’s a DOS attack, another missionary would take my place in under five minutes. If a brothel was after me they’d have just sent someone up to shoot us.” She wandered over to the window and stared out at the street. She drummed her fingers softly against the glass. I noticed her left foot was thrumming too. Twitching, maybe. I’d never seen my mistress fidget.

“If it is a deprogramming job they’ve fucked it up royally. They should never have left me alone with you.” I looked up to ask why and in the three seconds that took she crossed the room, spun me around by the shoulder and slammed me down against my work station. 

The gun was out of my hand and pressed to my neck before I thought to use it. 

“Did you deprogram me, Jasten? Is this how they do it now? Send in children posing as caretakers to spring their traps?” 

“No!” 

“If you’re a caretaker then why didn’t you administer the potassium chloride? Release me to the Provider?” 

“I thought I could still save you! I’m sorry! We never discussed what I should do. I didn’t know what you wanted. I just… I need you. Her. My mistress. I need her back.”  

Sindar lowered the gun and gently squeezed the back of my neck with her hand. “So she doesn’t touch you, she never discussed assisted suicide… what the fuck does she use you for, pojke?” 

I didn’t answer her. Whatever I said, she’d just turn it into something vile.  

“I’m sorry,” she chuckled, wandering back to the window. “I’m sorry; I’m paranoid. There are a lot of people out to get me. There were seven years ago, at least. And you’re about the last person I’d ever expect to wake up beneath. It smelled like a set up for a second there.” She strolled back towards me. I was still standing against the workstation with nowhere to escape to. She pulled my hand out again and pressed the gun back into my palm. “Here. I trust you. We both want the same thing, which is to put me back to sleep and get your mistress back where she belongs. Do they still buffer avatars on the church servers?” 

“Up in the datasphere,” I replied, staring into her face, trying to decide whether I trusted her. 

“Cloud storage? Accessible over internet from any terminal, then?” 

“Well,” I started. She was pacing again. And I was holding the gun. “I mean technically yes, but you won’t be able to synch your cybernetics without the chair.” 

 “How have they still not figured out how to do that?” She stared at me like she actually expected an answer so I looked away. 

“What do we do?” 

Sindar scrubbed her ports with her hand and stalked towards the tower of servers, clucking in Swedish. I stood by the workstation and pressed refresh to no avail.

“Wherever the break is it’s not in our equipment,” she declared in English. “The chair, the modem, everything’s fine. We just need to restore the connection and hope the hard reset didn’t fry my hardware too badly.” 

She hopped over onto my terminal, running her hand down my arm as she hovered over my shoulder. “Still figuring out if you should trust me, pojke? You shouldn’t but you don’t have much of a choice. I’ll return her to you in one piece if it’s at all possible though, you have my word. I wrote most of the tricks in this book, so not to worry.” She started typing furiously at the keyboard, pulling up screens I’d never seen before, but which I recognized as our building’s firewall and defense systems. That she’d been a hacker before her port surgery surprised me even less than the fact that she’d been a drug addict. But it was still unsettling to see her launch so effortlessly into tactile technology. Cyborgs didn’t code with their fingers. 

“Internet’s down in the whole building,” she commented, ostensibly to me. She rubbed at a port near the back of her head. “They must have a blocker because I can’t even piggyback a satellite.” 

I glanced over at her screen, curiosity getting the better of me. And I noticed it. “That icon at the bottom. That alert. That’s an incoming message from the front desk.” 

“Probably telling us the internet’s down.” 

“An email to tell us the internet’s not working?” 

She rolled her eyes and clicked the flashing white icon and the screen blanked completely for a second. I covered my mouth while Sindar swore and then three large letters flashed in blue 

TAK

“Is it a name?” I asked to break the silence. “Initials?” 

“Roof,” she corrected. “Translated from Swedish,” she added as if I were incredibly slow. “They’re finally making their demands.”  

 

~ EIGHT ~

 

Sindar jumped up from the terminal and threw open our front door. I gasped in the rush of cold hallway air as I caught up. She hadn't checked to make sure the hallway was clear. She wasn't even wearing her hat. 

"Your ports," I muttered, looking around for something to cover her head with. 

If she heard me she ignored me. She was stuck in the doorway, staring at her reflection in the hallway mirror, cursing again in Swedish under her breath. She seemed horrified by her appearance, to the point that for a second I wondered if perhaps she was actually praying rather than cursing. 

“Neighbours,” I warned under my breath. I jostled her a bit. “This is too risky, we should stay inside. Find some way to contact the church.” 

She inhaled sharply, ran her fingers across her skull for a second, and marched down the hallway. “Come along, pojke. We have two hours at most to restore the chair’s net connections before the datasphere server deletes the backup copy of your mistress. Let’s see what the saboteurs want.” 

She couldn't keep up her pace for very long. By the time we reached the elevators she was back to using my shoulder as a crutch.I felt naked out in the hallway with this Sindar who was higher than a cloud, swore worse than a stable boy, and looked like she'd spent the last two years bedridden with some horrible wasting disease. 

When my mistress went out of the apartment she was at pains to cover herself with scarves to preserve her modesty. Clearly modesty was a habit taken over by her cybernetic neural pathways. Sindar hadn’t even fully done up her shirt. I used my proximity as crutch to keep her still while I shoved her shoes onto her feet and looped the single scarf I was able to grab around her neck and head. The scarf was thin. We weren’t going to fool anyone. 

There was a man in the elevator who looked at us but he didn't give Sindar more than a short, queer glance. He was absorbed with whatever was on his phone. 

“Are you picking up a signal in here?” Sindar asked, leaning over the man's shoulder to peer down at his screen. I pulled sharply on the sleeve of her shirt but she shook me off. The gun, which Sindar had shoved into the back of my pants after I'd awkwardly tried to tuck it into my front pocket, slid dangerously low. I had to reach and adjust it, and by the time I had, the man's phone was in Sindar's hands. The man looked mortified and kept glancing over at me. What did he expect me to do? 

“Incredible!” Sindar crowed, scrolling through his phone. “I've never been able to get a net signal in this elevator. You are magic, sir. I must have been doing something wrong.” The man pressed a button for the next floor, even though he'd clearly pressed the button for a higher floor before we got in, and strode off, abandoning his phone with a final desperate, guilty look at me.  

I glared at Sindar. “Oh lighten up,” she grinned, “he was looking at a site he had no business looking at on a public elevator. He should be ashamed. He still has satellite web to net portal access though. Had, anyway. Nothing near the bandwidth we’d need, but you’ll need a phone that hasn’t been compromised if you’re going to call the Church for backup, yes?” My heart thumped as I nodded. Thank the Provider, we were finally going to get some help. 

Sindar wasn’t calling anyone, though. She was typing furiously and staring at the tiny screen. And she must have been trying to placate me. She needed me as a cane and gun holster, after all. 

“Who do you think is up there?” 

She kept typing like I hadn’t asked the question. I hadn’t really expected an answer. Interpol. Enemies. Cops. Bad guys. People with guns. Even if we called the church, the chances that they could send help to us IRL within the next two hours were remote. 

The doors opened on the building’s communal garden and patio. The sun filtered through the building’s immense Plexiglas windows.

“Maybe we shouldn’t-” Sindar wasn’t listening to me. She was plowing ahead onto the bright open terrace with another gust of wind in her sails. I hesitated long enough for the elevator doors to start closing before scrambling out after her.

The sun tingled wonderfully on my skin, even through the Plexiglass roof. I squinted at Sindar, determined to get the phone from her and at least try to call the church for advice if nothing else. I took a step towards her but she took two more steps away from me and shook her head the smallest bit. “Not yet. When I’m dead or gone, that’s when you make the call. As far as church doctrine goes, I’m untouchable now that my soul’s gone, right? They won’t help me. But don’t worry. The taboo lifts as soon as I die and they’ll send someone to bring you back into the fold as soon as it’s confirmed.” She pocketed the phone and stared down at the intricate tile terrace. 

“You said we’d get her back!” 

“We will, we will. I just think you should be… prepared.” 

I closed my eyes, smiled, and shut her out. I let myself believe I was back in California. The air was numbingly cold on my bare arms despite the Plexiglass insulation, which detracted a bit from the fantasy. But all in all I could think of worse places to wait. I’d waited ten days for Murray to die in his chair before someone from the church would finally agree to come get me. I thought I’d been prepared then. There was no way to prepare. 

The sun though, the sun was bright and comforting on my eyelids. Distracting. At the stable they used to bring us outside to play in the late afternoon sun before the evening rush of clients. I always liked to sleep in it, out in the sand at the edge of the compound, away from the servers, where everything was quiet. 

“You'd like Sweden.” 

Sindar was smiling at me from the other side of the roof. I cracked my eyes open to confirm it. She was glancing at me in between rapid bursts of typing. I didn’t say anything. I appreciated the space she’d put between us though, and the change of subject. 

“When she's back, tell her I told you to tell her that she owes it to you to take you to Lapland in August, when the sun never ever fucking sets. You’re the palest kid I’ve ever seen and I grew up around Nordic net junkies.” 

I scoffed. The idea of my mistress and I, out in the world, on a trip, on a vacation of all things, when she would barely spare an afternoon twice a month for grocery shopping. The idea of my mistress outside for the sole purpose of enjoying the sunshine. Ridiculous. All of it was so much worldly distraction anyway. She was better than that. She’d never go to a beach. Beaches were full souls roasting inside their skins, bodies like little prisons of sin and death, all gathered together to worship the sun like old pagans bleeding out rams on their stone altars. Of course this Sindar wouldn’t understand. 

Sindar smirked. “Oh, I understand completely, pojke. She didn’t invent asceticism, your fucking mistress.”  

I scowled. “What are we doing up here? Who are you texting?” 

“This is all far more anticlimax than I thought it might be.” 

“What?” 

“Come on out, fuckface, so that I can tell you to go fuck yourself in person and be on my way.” 

I opened my eyes all the way, and turned, and there was a man standing near the elevator. He wore a deep purple suit, cut like the suits our neighbours wore to work but made of much finer material that shimmered in the light. His pocketed a phone and smirked like he was secretly satisfied that Sindar had called out to him the way she had. 

“It is you,” he all but purred. “Beloved, it’s been so long. I see you’ve moved on. I’ll admit I wasn’t 100% faithful myself.” 

 “Eero?” She said sweetly. I turned back to watch the man because I knew what was coming and wanted to hide my irritation from her. “Go fucking fuck yourself.” 

It was one thing for her to curse while she spoke but did she have to waste my mistress’s time cursing redundantly? 

“Interpol is coming,” he continued conversationally. “They were very interested when I told them I would be seeing you. They may not have been able to crack your encryption themselves but they were able to persuade people who could, once I gave them your coordinates. You’ve bought yourself an hour at maximum by moving out here to the wilderness. They’re all driving down still, sirens blaring.Out of respect for the bonds we once shared, I’m offering you an opportunity to escape. It’ll be open for two minutes after I confirm that you’ve given me the proper keys to your accounts. The ones that won’t destroy the data this time. There’s an open security door waiting, a ladder down to the underground parking lot, an unmarked car, and a new passport. I didn’t have time to make anything up for the concubine but I’m sure you can stuff him in the boot.” 

Sindar’s mouth hardened but she didn’t reply. I turned to see why she wasn’t negotiating for a restored net connection but she glared me into silence. 

He squared his shoulders and caught Sindar’s eye again. She broke contact first, darting her eyes back down at me like she’d forgotten every curse word she’d ever learned, and then at her feet. “Don’t be stubborn, darling.” His teasing tone of superiority was gone. “You’ve already lost.Don’t make me take all of your toys away again.” I edged away from him, closer to Sindar, before I realized I was doing it. She held her arm out at her side and I slid into it to support her. 

“That is what you’re after though, isn’t it? My toys?” 

“What was it you wrote in your grant proposal? ‘My wireless data port designs will bring sensanet technology out of the back alleys and brothels and into the hospitals, universities, and households of a thriving new world?’ Hardly just a toy, though the entertainment sector will demand exclusive first access.”

Sindar was cursing him in Swedish before he could finish and Eero responded in kind, grin stretching from ear to ear, advancing on us like he was gaining ground. 

I couldn’t follow what they were saying of course but every now and again they would switch to English as they argued. And I began to piece together the trade Sindar was turning down – escape in exchange for some kind of password. A password that had to do with trådlöstek – the rumoured name of a developing sensanet port technology that wouldn’t require wires or a chair. 

I was, as far as I knew, the only freak to ever survive something like a trådlöstek surgery. It had been a complete fluke – they’d meant to install regular ports into my skull but someone had stolen the wrong ones off a tanker somewhere along the line and sold them in a bulk shipment of brothel-bound cybernetics. My stable did at least 12 surgeries before they realized the problem, and the other 11 kids didn’t survive neural synthesis. I survived with dysfunctional ports. 

When he’d first said “wireless” I’d been sure that the man had been asking her to trade her freedom for me. As they shouted at one another though I started to doubt that he even knew my ports were wireless. He didn’t glance in my direction except to say lewd things and call me a catamite. Sindar did not correct him, but she wasn’t supporting herself on my shoulder as I thought she’d planned to. No, instead her hand was squeezing my shoulder and holding me close to her. Holding me slightly behind her. Sindar knew I had wireless ports; Eero did not but was trying to extract whatever information he thought she had about them at the cost of her freedom. 

They were bantering, on and on, like they had all the time in the world. Like my mistress wasn’t minutes from being deleted. 

I pulled the gun from the waist of my pants and nudged it into Sindar’s hand. She raised the weapon at Eero without pause, curses tumbling out of her mouth one after the other. I smiled at him. We would blackmail him into giving us what we needed and then we would escape anyway, I tried to convey. 

He looked uneasy for a fraction of a second and then smiled all the wider. “Stay here and play at being a terrorist if you want,” he said, switching to English for my benefit even though he was talking to Sindar. “I’ll get the tech out of you one way or another. The building is surrounded with my own security, of course. A word from me and they’ll let you pass through undetected. Give me the key and I’ll give that word.” His eyes shifted to me then, and landed on the arm Sindar had wedged between us, and his eyes brightened. “Perhaps, if you’re not interested in giving me what I want to save your own life, your boy might be interested in trading for his? Or did you program every last instinct of self-preservation out of him when you made him-”

It happened in less than a second. I missed the sight of Sindar raising the gun in the air because I’d turned to look into her face, to assure her that I wasn’t going to make any such deal and that she shouldn’t either. I caught the flash of dread in her eyes, and then the quiet spark of joy, and I missed the bullet entirely, if it was even visible at all. 

When I looked back, blood was pouring between Eero’s fingers near his ear. He’d fallen to his knees, and blood was spilling over the stones. Sindar dragged me past him toward the elevator before I could get a good look. I didn’t want to see it, it made my heart race and my head pound, but at the same time I couldn’t look away. He was practically frothing with rage but he was twisting on the terrace in what seemed like agony. 

"Now, pojke.” She pulled at my arm and nearly fell into the elevator as the doors slid open. I pressed the door-close button frantically, terrified that Eero would raise a weapon of his own and shoot Sindar dead. She was leaning heavily on me, nearly covering my body with her own, but it wasn’t protective. She was laughing out of control and needed my support to keep from collapsing into a fit of giggles.

~ NINE ~ 

 

The hand that wasn't clenched around my shoulder for support, the hand with the loaded gun, shook against the metal railing of the elevator as we rode downwards. A soft clinking sound.  

"Give it back," I reached before she could reply. The metal was warm where she'd gripped it. I held it behind my leg out of sight. 

“Couldn’t resist,” she gasped. She was still trying to catch her breath. I reminded myself, again, that this was temporary. And that her sins would not fall on my mistress’s conscience. As her caretaker, did that mean they fell onto mine? 

"He’ll have alerted his security,” she changed the subject. “Jasten, pojke, it is time for you to run from your evil hypocrite of a mistress." 

I flushed at the sound of my name and almost missed the rest. Sinful thoughts of abandoning Sindar had crowded in the moment I took the gun back. It wasn't like I couldn't outrun her.  

But I didn't have the password Eero was asking for, didn’t know whether he was a friend to my mistress or a foe. Wasn’t about to tell him I had a rare trådlöstek prototype embedded in my scalp. And on my own I wouldn’t be able to run far. I didn’t even properly know what country we were in. All I'd gathered from our market trips was that we were further north than California and that neither English nor Swedish was the primary language. And I had zero identification, not even a birth chip. No serial numbers on my ports, of course not, they’d been scrambled. No money, no way to even claim money that wasn’t hard currency. I wasn’t even wearing a winter coat.  

So I could leave and die alone, cold and free. 

Or I could stay, and possibly die with Sindar. 

Or – and this seemed the likeliest option – I could do what I'd done when my stable had been raided and stick close enough to the action to be noticed and rescued by the intruders. A 'concubine', as Eero had called me, is a creature to be pitied, not slaughtered for its master's crimes. 

"If we can’t leave the building then we need to restore the chair’s connection to the datasphere. We need our bandwidth back. Where would we do that? The utility floor?” 

“The IT control room,” she said, still breathless from laughter. 

“We can take the stairs from the storage lockers. No one will see us." 

“The actual deprogrammers will be down there. Eero couldn’t code his way out of an ipod shuffle.” 

 "Maybe we can still negotiate.”

She sighed and squeezed my shoulder and when she spoke she’d stopped laughing. “Without the gun I won't have much to bargain with.”

“You're a high-ranked member of the church now. She is. Whatever. If it’s Interpol after us, you might have connections. Information.”

 She chuckled something in Swedish. I got the sense that she was amused at how swiftly I'd proposed we become heretics. Perhaps she could tell by how run-down our apartment was that I was lying about how highly ranked she was in the church. There was no question that she was valued – she worked all the time, and on high profile missions. But she was a missionary, and missionaries were kept out of the wardship precisely because they were often compromised like this, by vengeful stable owners, or by Interpol, or both.  

I wondered whether to apologize for my deception or try a new tack. I was proving to be such a poor missionary, a doubting Peter instead of a Paul. I was glad my mistress was not here to see it. The elevator stopped at the tenth floor. Two wide-eyed women stared in shock at Sindar's exposed head through the sliding metal doors. 

I stood straighter and pushed the button for the elevator doors to close, forgetting that I still had the gun in my hand. The ladies did not try to board with us. I pressed the button for the sub-basement. I imagined burly, black clad, gun-toting security men on the other side of the doors and held the gun against my thigh in tense excitement as the elevator passed by first floor.

The subbasement of storage lockers was quiet and humid. I dragged Sindar behind me down the long hallway but it was useless. She was very unsteady and her shoes made a loud clacking noise against the tile. I propped her up against a garbage can by the second set of elevators. “I'll go down and have a look at the servers. You stay here and hold the elevator.” 

“I want to make some kind of joke about how you should just take me all the way down to the incinerator instead of chucking me by the trash can, but-” She laughed so hard she doubled over and wheezed. “Honestly that’s not even why I’m laughing. All I can think about right now is how Eero's going to have to explain that gorgeous scar I gave him to the Duchess.” She laughed in bursting, melodic warbles and wiped tears from her eyes. It was still a loud ugly laugh but I was too sad and sorry to be annoyed with her. “Sorry,” she wiped her eyes,“I really didn't believe you when you told me she was off the stims.” She reached down and adjusted my grip on the gun, repositioning my thumb and index finger. “Go on without me, wave your gun around like you know how to use it, and get our bandwidth back. I’ll handle things here. Be careful.”

 

~ TEN ~

 

I was quick and quiet, not that there was anyone in the hallway to hear me. The lights flickered on as I entered the range of their motion sensors – nothing to do about that; if there were security cameras down here I was certainly visible, as was Sindar, and they’d go after her first. 

I didn't know what to do about this, didn't know whether to be more concerned for her or for myself. Didn’t know whether Eero actually had security, or whether they would even hurt me if they did find me. Eero hadn’t even threatened us, not in English at least. We were the criminals. I was the one with the gun. I trusted my mistress, but I knew nothing about Sindar the drug addict, who was overly affectionate with me and laughed herself sick over shooting someone in the face.

The door to the stairwell creaked when I opened it and I winced but I heard no steps on the stairs above or below. I slid down the six stairs to one landing, then another, using the banisters as supports, moving quickly. In my head I deliberated the various diagnostics I could run to try to reboot our net connection, and whether I had the right equipment. I passed the incinerator and debated tossing the gun inside, walking back upstairs, and turning myself in to whoever was coming after us. 

I stood for a second in front of the door to the IT control room. I could hear voices from inside, someone was crying. I was eyeing the elevator doors down the hall when I heard loud explosions above – gunshots, maybe. I slipped back from the door, hoping whoever was inside might decide to go up to investigate. I wasn’t fast enough. The door swung open before I could hide. 

The first thing I registered was Eero, sitting in a chair directly across from the door, with a white towel pressed to the side of his face. Blood was seeping through. He stood when he saw me and started muttering to the woman next to him in Swedish.  

I was going to run, but I got distracted by the woman. Her long white-blond hair hung loose and even in the dim light of the control room her grey eyes burned. She wore strands of pearls around her neck which dipped between her small breasts and into her blue dress. 

But it was her face that distracted me while the man who’d opened the door pulled me into the room. She had Sindar's same face. Every angle of it was familiar to me except that where Sindar’s skin was a warm brown the woman’s skin was so white that it was practically translucent. 

Behind her, a bearded man in a thick wool sweater was saying “Bring him in,” and crossing his arms. He was large and thick, like a bouncer. He had an accent but it wasn’t a Swedish one. He was dressed in dark blue and I wondered for a second if he was a cop. Was he maybe an Interpol agent? 

The man who’d opened the door and pulled me in shut the door behind him, blocking my exit. He was younger than Eero and the cop, but older than me, maybe in his twenties. He was tall, beyond six feet, and most of it was leg and neck. He had dark blond hair that fell past his ears almost to his shoulders. He tipped his head back towards the cop and I turned, obligingly. 

I stared past the cop this time and blinked hard. I'd been down to the control room a handful of times with Sindar.We helped our superintendents with the maintenance in order to install illegal speed boosters and redundancies to our connection, so I knew what the equipment was supposed to look like. Behind the cop the delicate mesh of wires that took up the far wall had been decimated. Cables had been stripped. Modems had been disassembled. They'd destroyed the entire thing, made a colossal mess of it. It would take hours to find the problems and days to fix them. 

“Why?” I caught myself blinking again, at a complete loss. 

The blanched Sindar lookalike turned anxiously to Eero, who was laughing under his breath. The cop cleared his throat. 

“No one will be hurt,” he said. He sounded unsure, though. “Eero is also paying us to restore everyone’s service after we’ve helped Sindar. This is just a precaution. Why don’t you have a seat? You must have questions.” 

There wasn’t a third chair in the room. He gestured down towards where Eero was already sitting and seemed momentarily lost. I turned to leave but the towering blond was still blocking the door so I turned back. At first seeing the ruined wiring paralyzed me but the longer the silence sat the angrier I became. 

"If you want to help her you have to restore the nets now,” I insisted, waving the gun around unintentionally at first and then intentionally. “She'll die otherwise. I know it's illegal and everything, but you’re not really official cops, are you? If he’s paying you?” 

Eero laughed in the exact same lilting hysterics I heard from Sindar while she’d been enjoying thoughts of his disfigurement. The cop crossed his arms again. 

“What are you?” I asked, trying my best to imitate Sindar’s belligerence on the roof. “Assassins?” 

The woman opened her mouth to speak but said nothing. Her bottom lip trembled. I kept my eye on the cop though. He looked the guiltiest by far. 

“We’re not here to kill her,” he said, placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She’s been brainwashed by a powerful cult. We’re here to get her the help she needs. We’re here to save her.” 

I forgot negotiation then. I forgot self-preservation. I nearly forgot about my mistress I was so enraged. “What gives you the right to come in and destroy her life? Pass judgment on her and the way she lives? Why? Because that creepy devil paid you to? Like none of you cops ever use your official chairs for informal undercover ‘investigation’ down in the stables?" The woman screamed, and sure enough the gun was gesturing right along with me, levelled right at her and the cop. My finger wasn’t on the trigger but I fixed that as soon as I remembered what I was there to do. 

"I'm not a cop,” the cop was enunciating in a frustratingly even tone. “I'm a doctor. My name is Rufus. I'm here with Sindar's family. Sindar needs help. She’s not well." He’d uncrossed his arms to put his hands up, which I appreciated. He didn’t back away from me though. He was slowly advancing.

"She'd be fine if you hadn’t destroyed our connection!" 

"You just said yourself that she can't survive without the chair. She has an addiction. I know it's frightening and she has sent you down here to protect her, but trust me – the way to protect her is to bring us to her so that we can help her begin her detox. Help her see the serious harm she’s doing to herself with the drugs and the chair she’s using.” 

I shook my head. The gun felt slippery in my palm. I gripped it harder, my finger on the trigger this time.

The doctor took another slow step towards me. “In forty minutes or so, the server that's storing her cybernetic consciousness will assume that her body has died and delete the file. The stories about a person’s consciousness surviving inside the net are just myths - no one would keep such a large amount of data on a server forever, not with hundreds of disconnects happening every year. So yes, in that sense, a part of her will be gone. But she will get back so much in return. We are only purging her cybernetics of all that bad church programming that tells her to cut off all connections to the outside world, to the people who love her, to her own personality and memories. Listen to me, I know what I’m talking about I was in the church once too. What’s up in the datasphere isn’t her, it’s just her addiction. Once it’s gone she’ll be free again. So we need your-”

I fired the gun. I hadn’t exactly planned to do it, hadn’t even aimed at anything. I’d needed very much to stop the conversation and it worked. The sound left a satisfying ring in my ear as it reverberated in the tiny room. 

The bullet bored itself into the wall a foot or so above the doctor’s head. 

 I hadn’t anticipated the recoil, which sent me careening back. Albino-Sindar was crying hysterically with her face buried in her hands. Eero launched from his chair and tackled me. The bloody towel he’d been holding to his ear fell over my face as I struggled to get away without losing my grip on the gun. Eero and I grappled for a frantic few seconds before Eero was on top choking the life out of me. 

 

~ ELEVEN ~

 

I could hear the doctor's laboured breathing as he tried to pull me free of the strangling arm Eero had pressed to my throat. I had the gun pressed to Eero's hip but his fingers were crushing mine and I couldn't reach the trigger. Blood from his torn ear dripped against my chin, sticky and warm. He was panting with effort. Or maybe he was just mocking me. I had nothing to exhale but my mouth was trying to go through the motions anyway. 

“Little fucking shit” he snarled. His breath reeked of stale coffee and cigarettes. “Put you out of your fucking misery.”

I'd gone so long without a full breath that my blood began to roar in my ears. It was the tall blond who gently kicked the gun out of our hands just as my grip was starting to fade. The gun clattered to the ground and Eero lunged off me to grab it. The doctor elbowed Eero’s injured ear and sent him sprawling over with a howl while the doctor’s graceful partner dropped a long arm down to retrieve my weapon from the floor

He held the gun in his hand for a moment, running a thumb over the smooth handle, and frowned faintly down at me for a moment. He emptied the bullets into his jacket pocket with one hand and slid the gun itself into his back pocket with the other. He caught the doctor’s eye. Frowned harder. 

The doctor got to his feet with a hand up from his partner. He crowded over Eero, shouting down over him and shaking his finger. “That boy wasn’t even aiming at you! You should be ashamed of yourself. If you interfere in our deprogramming operation again I will let David empty the boy’s gun into your billion dollar prototype.” 

Eero was gasping on the ground like he was the one who’d just been strangled. The blond raised his eyebrows in the doctor’s direction, catching his partner in a silent conversation that ended with an ambiguous head roll. Then he knelt over me and rolled me onto my side, keeping himself between me and Eero, with his fingers pressed lightly to my throat and an eye on his watch. The doctor pressed on, yelling now. “If you had been honest and upfront with me about your wife’s status we would never have accepted this job! But since we’re here now you are going to follow my rules. Sit down, put pressure on your wound, and if you’re lucky I’ll stitch it up so that you don’t have to explain it to the gendarmerie.” 

Eero didn’t move to sit. The doctor grabbed the towel off the floor and pressed it firmly to Eero’s ear as he berated him in a low voice I wasn’t intended to hear. “This boy is a slave programmed by the church to give his life for his mistress. He doesn’t know any better.” 

The blond’s face was turned towards mine, away from the doctor, and so I caught the look of shame and anger that flashed in his eyes when the doctor started whispering to Eero. He tipped his head further towards me, away from his partner, to check a bit of blood on my shoulder that was actually Eero's blood. And I saw it. Just a small glint of metal under his blond hair, just above his ear.

“Probably has never been to school,” the doctor hissed.“Probably doesn't even remember the last time he left this apartment building, probably doesn't even have a name! He deserves compassion, especially from us. He’s the real victim in this.” I moved to get to my feet, ready to show the doctor exactly what his compassion would earn from me, but my blond cyborg nurse warned me off with a glare, a hand pressed firmly against my shoulder, and a slight shake of his head. Did his master even let him speak? 

“What will happen to him? The boy?" The woman had stopped crying and was wiping her eyes with the backs of her trembling hands. She had to be Sindar’s sister, she didn’t seem young enough to be her daughter, though with Sindar so much thinner and the woman’s skin so much paler it was hard to gauge. It was her voice more than anything that convinced me she was younger. Her voice was bright and sincere, like my mistress’s, but she had Sindar’s thicker accent. Would she help us? 

“He'll be set free to start a life of his own,” the doctor was reassuring her. “There are several charities which-” I pushed myself free of the blond and sat up, coughing and retching. 

"You have no right to do this," I croaked at the doctor. I cleared my throat. The blond was silent next to me, still blocking me but doing nothing to prevent me from turning to face Sindar’s sister. "Please listen to me. Maybe the Sindar you knew from before was a junkie… but I've been with her for years and she's not an addict now. She's fine. She's good. She's kind, and she spends her time trying to make the sensanet a brighter place. She saves people. Kids. She gives up all her time, she sacrifices her health, and she doesn't ask for anything in return. And you haven’t seen it, but the Sindar out there now? The Sindar you brought back? She’s the addict. She’s on stims right now. And she’s an attempted murderer. She only shot the devil in the ear but she was aiming for his head, I swear. She laughed about it. Whatever happened to her out in your world to make her the way she is now, the church is the thing that healed her. You can't take it away. She needs it.”

Eero started muttering in Swedish before I’d even finished. Sindar’s sister was crying again, and couldn’t even look at me. “Please,” I begged. “Please, it’s not too late.”  

“Shut up, Eero,” the doctor interrupted. “Agnes,” he said, his voice gentle this time. “The church is only helping Sindar hide from her problems. It’s masking the root cause of her addiction, the way the stims once did. Only the sensanet will kill her five times faster. She needs counseling, proper rest, nutrition, and exercise. She needs real relationships. With real people.” He held her hands for a second, conveniently blocking me from her view.I stood speechless, wondering whether he considered my relationship with Sindar non-real because I was her caretaker, or whether he was alluding to the fact that my status as a Hollywood clone meant I was legally a non-person. I couldn’t hear what he said next but I saw her silvery hair bob and knew she’d nodded, and what that meant. 

He turned back to me then and his voice was even softer. “I know we must seem like brutal outsiders but we're not. Believe me, I understand your position. I was in the church for over twenty years before my family was able to save enough money to deprogram me. The adjustment wasn't easy, but I have never looked back.” 

“Provider frag you,” I cursed him, ashamed even as the words left my mouth that I would speak such a thing to someone who had seen the Provider’s light when I myself had not. He frowned at me with the pitying look a ward might give a heathen, as if my insult meant nothing to him. For a heretic, he certainly had the arrogance of the power-hungry clerics I'd interacted with online — the ones who believed too much in their own righteousness to leave much time to believe in the Provider. Despicable. Not worth speaking to. If the doctor was an ex-ward, that had to make the blond cyborg a caretaker like me, wouldn’t it? Or was he an ex-ward too? 

I stared up at him looking for support. He didn’t turn away from me but his face was unreadable. There was a long pause where he might have said something. Backed up what his partner had said. Denied it. Promised to help me. Tried to convince me to help him. He said nothing. He tilted his head again a bit, in his master’s direction, giving me a better look at the other ports right under his hairline, near his neck. I could see how faded his port scars were from that angle. The skin around the metal disks was smooth and white, and hair grew right up to the edges. Just like mine. They’d happened long before he’d turned eighteen.  

“David chose to join me in my work when I got clean,” the doctor said with admiration in his voice as he caught me staring at his partner’s ports. "He was the one who convinced me that it was time for me to stop giving my life away to the Provider and give it back to the people who love me. He saved and restored me. You can do the same for Sindar.” 

I watched David fight to keep his expression neutral as his long neck swept down again to inspect the gun. If he was uncomfortable having the doctor speak for him he hid it well. Was the doctor still his master, then, even after they’d betrayed the church? I wondered if I could really stand to be Sindar’s boy out in the world like that, for the rest of my life. If we stayed here, if I got my mistress back, I could easily care for my mistress until I was old enough for my own port surgery. But to stay with Sindar? To see her every day and know she would never join the Provider in the afterlife because I’d been too weak to administer the potassium chloride she’d clearly left for me in her cabinet? How could any caretaker cope with the guilt of that and go on? 

“Sindar will be grateful, eventually,” David finally offered through a rigidly set jaw. 

“This is such bullshit,” Eero erupted. “Who the fuck cares about what Sindar's feeling? I wasted years of my life trying to make that bitch happy. It can't be done! And so what? We don't all get to be happy!” He turned to Agnes, trying to edge past the doctor to get her attention. “She’s had enough time, Agnes, you said so yourself. I gave her every fucking chance to hand over the trådlöstek peacefully and she shot me. It’s our technology. She developed it in my lab with your money, and she’s had years to work out the bugs. I’m not going to let her suck it back down into her vortex of delusion and zeal. It’s a miracle she hasn’t handed it over to the church on a silver platter already and we’d be fools to let that happen. She belongs with us, back in the lab.” 

“Enough,” the doctor was shouting at Eero again. “I didn’t deprogram Sindar so she could go back to your lab; I did it to save her life. Agnes, you can’t honestly expect Sindar to recover if you let this animal put her right back into her old life with all of its triggers. I know you care about your sister.”  

 “Do you have any idea what her fucking trip down the rabbit hole has cost?” Eero shouted at me. “How far it has set the company back? We might have solved the disconnect problem, developed safer screening protocols. We might have been able to stop all that clone testing she got her royal panties in a twist about. We could have done this and more if she actually gave a shit about making the net a better place and got back to work. She can terrorize sad little pimps all she wants on her own time after she’s finished paying me back for her custom multimillion dollar port surgery.” 

I knew Sindar had gotten her ports when she was eighteen and I assumed she’d grown up in Sweden but we’d never discussed anything else outside of the church, including how she’d paid for the surgery. I knew my mistress so well – knew her body, anyway. But I hadn’t know about the drugs, or the gun, and now she had a husband and a sister and what did I really know about the things she’d given up when she’d joined the church? I didn’t trust either the doctor or Eero’s version of Sindar, but did I really know any better than they did what was best for her? What if they were right? 

I ran a hand through my hair, rubbing at the rough, itchy skin around my own cheap ports. I wished I could talk to my mistress. To confirm that she’d made a change while in the church and that she was the one worth saving. If it was too late to save my mistress it wasn’t too late to follow through with her wishes and ensure she died online like a true missionary hero. I looked to David, wanting to be convinced one way or the other by the only person who’d been in my situation. I wanted him to be committal, convincing. I wanted a clear and easy answer. He wouldn't meet my eye. 

“I'll bring her here,” I said. I wanted out of the room and away from all of them. 

The doctor beamed, even though what he was actually saying – “She'll be weak. Why don't you take us to her?” – should have required a look of concern. 

“Idiots,” Eero rolled his eyes. “She's probably been captured by my security team. They’ll have her here any minute." I’d honestly thought the same thing but I’d been gone for almost fifteen minutes now and Sindar shouldn’t have been hard to find. If they really were looking for her what could be taking them so long? 

“You said you wouldn't hurt her!” the sister wailed. “We had a deal, Eero.” 

“Have I hurt her? Have I done anything? I've been sitting here, bleeding, from a wound your sister gave me. Thank you for your sympathy, by the way.” 

“Let me talk to her alone,” I interrupted, pushing myself up to my feet. "Let me convince her to come to you. It'll be better if she makes the choice to go offline and turn herself in." David was already moving towards the door, standing sentry in the entryway. 

The doctor was gathering supplies into a bag. “I really should go with you. She could be at risk for a stroke.” He was moving towards the door but when he got to the door David put his arm up high against the doorframe. 

“No,” David muttered. His voice was rich and weirdly accented, like he’d reassigned the letter H to some words and dismissed it from others. “Leh’im go.” The doctor tensed behind me, inhaling and fidgeting. So much guilt in his face. And I knew that look. Had gotten a look like that from my own mistress just this morning when I was still the one to be pitied. David sighed, letting his hair fall into his face but leaving his lean arm across the doorway to bar his master from following me. 

David nodded to me without actually meeting my eyes, just a shake of his long hair. “E’s fine. G’on now.” 

I slipped beneath his arm without any further prompting. I wasn't fine. But I was determined.There were still thirty minutes left. 

 

~ TWELVE ~

 

Sindar wasn't propped against the garbage can where I'd left her. There were five unconscious men and women in body armor piled in a bloody heap at the foot of the elevator and one naked unconscious woman sprawled next to a pile of Sindar's clothes. 

I didn't say anything but I must have made some kind of sound because an elevator door opened and Sindar poked her head out. She was holding some kind of weapon, shaped like a truncheon only much slimmer. Sticky drops of blood were drying on her cheeks. Her left eye was twitching. 

“Don't look down, just keep walking towards me. It's safe. I'll put the fuckers back down again if any of them try anything.”

“Sindar, your face,” I protested. I could see swelling beneath the red splatters.

“My eye? It keeps thinking it's found a signal is all. I forgot I even had the prototype installed there. Now come here, I've been holding the elevator for ages and it's going to make that ringing noise.”

I picked my way carefully across the floor. She was right - I didn't want to look down. Something had mangled them. I didn't understand how it could have been Sindar, when she'd been barely strong enough to walk down the hall, but although she’d wiped her palms clean I could still see the blood under her nails and between her fingers. 

As soon as I was within arm’s reach she yanked me over a pile of limp, uniformed torsos and into the elevator. She pressed the button for our floor. 

“You seem stronger…” I said after I’d had a few seconds to process. How many of the people in that pile had she killed with her bare hands? 

“The first few punches kicked my sense memory back online. I remembered a few tricks from when I was ... never mind. Your mistress is not going to be happy with the damage I've done to our body, is she?”

“No.” 

Sindar squeezed my shoulder and my heart thumped with the guilt of the false hope I might have just given her. 

“So.”

“They destroyed all the hardware in the building,” I blurted. “There's an ex-ward and an ex-caretaker downstairs waiting for you. We need to go somewhere else. We’ll never get a connection here.”

 “My ports are all different prototypes. Not compatible with any other chair configuration. And I don’t think you can carry me and my giant chair out of here without people noticing.” 

My heart sank and yet I wasn't surprised. “Prototypes... were you a test subject? Is that why Eero wants you back?”

She laughed. “What makes you think… oh. No, I'm not quite like you. My father owned a tech company where I was a developer. That's how I met Eero. His mother owned a rival company and I married the psychopath to run my father’s empire into the ground. He smelled like skunk cabbage most of the time but his labs were fucking transcendental. And I will admit that I made the common and tragic error of thinking he’d be less of an asshole once we were married. But marriage only gives fuckers like him more twisted ideas about what belongs to them. Did I foresee that he would try to privatize the living shit out of every advance I made and sell it exclusively to scumbags? I did not. But it’s not a mistake I’m going to make twice, I can promise that much at least.” 

The elevator stopped on the eighth floor and Sindar strode out the sliding doors, truncheon raised. She was halfway to our apartment when two armored men popped their heads out of our door and started firing at us – silent, police issue stun-blasters, not guns like Sindar's. 

“Down,” she commanded. Two of the blasts hit her armoured chest and one hit her arm, leaving a nasty smell of burned flesh in the air. She charged with the truncheon, kicking and thrusting and grunting. It only took a couple of hits before the guards were on the ground. Sindar pushed them into the hallway and pulled me into the apartment while I stared, mouth agape. 

“It's a gravity disrupter,” she finally said, shaking her head at my shocked look. “I'm not a freak mutant or anything. Well. Not of that kind.” She shut the door behind us. “The grunt who threatened me with it down in the basement had no idea how to use it. Here, watch.” She locked the door behind her and gave me a quick demonstration on how to use the insane gravity disrupter to make myself bigger and stronger. We were wasting time, trying to pretend we had some final stand to make, some battle to win. We were both avoiding the sensanet chair, lying prone in the far corner of the main room. 

Sindar accepted when I offered to get her a glass of water and some food, and we sat down at the table, something my mistress and I had only done a handful of times in the very early days. We shared the rest of the bread I’d baked that morning, spread with our last bit of jam. 

“They let you go so that you could convince me to turn myself in, yes?”

“There has to be a way...” I began, and stopped. I looked up into her twitching eye. Maybe I didn't know the way, but maybe she did. She wasn't my mistress, but she still had skills. Maybe there was someone this Sindar could kill or maim to restore our net access?

Sindar looked down at the place setting with a faint smile on her face and muttered something in Swedish that didn’t contain a single curse word.  

“Come on,” I pressed, “You planned for everything. You were always so careful. You must have had a plan for what to do when someone deprogrammed you.” She looked up then and I could see there were tears in her eyes but she was smiling. 

"Of course she had a plan.” 

I stood, excited. But her face darkened. 

“Jasten. My darling. You are her plan.”

"Thank God,” I gushed in relief and walked back around to her side of the table, heading towards the chair and servers. “Tell me what to do.”

“No, you don't understand,” she shook her head. “I swore I was never going to bring home a caretaker. There’s only one reason an active missionary needs one, and that’s to destroy the incriminating evidence. Most missionaries keep a caretaker because they believe assisted suicide grants them access to a virtual life eternal, but I never believed in data resurrection, even after I joined the church. My data is data. Without my body my data will be inert. Nothing more than a string of numbers.” 

She caught my arm as I tried to shuffle past her. “Do you understand me, Jasten? I don’t believe a soul lives either inside my body or on the sensanet. I clearly didn’t leave you any data to destroy, either. So why would I keep you? What would make me contravene my own conscience and bring an already-exploited child into my home as a slave?” 

I opened my mouth to respond — I don't even know what I was going to say except that it was going to be angry — but she shushed me. “Don’t waste your breath defending her faith. She would never tell you she didn’t really believe in the hereafter. She wouldn’t have burdened you with her heresy. At first I thought she bought you for the usual selfish reasons. Thought she wanted an adoring acolyte, a convenient fuck, and a mercy kill. But-”

I shoved her shoulders hard, trying to make her let go of my arm, and ended up pushing her into our table. She was still holding the gravity disruptor. She crushed the table in two jagged halves and lay sprawled and bleeding in the ruin for a minute. 

I stared at her, just trying to get a full breath, to keep from panicking, to keep from rushing to help her. She didn’t try to get up right away, though she did scramble up into a sitting position after a moment. 

We stared at each other. It was pointless asking her to take back what she’d said. I’d pushed her because of the awful things she’d said about my mistress but I’d probably just confirmed to her that I was some kind of brainwashed cult child. 

I swallowed. This was the time to have faith. “She’s still on the server and you’re wasting her time. Tell me how to get her back. You said she had a plan. There has to be a way.”It was no use arguing about why my mistress had taken me on as her caretaker. She had and I was here. 

She arched an eyebrow. I tried to stare her down, not to let my concern for her bruised body show in my face. I wondered why she wasn’t getting up, worried I’d done some kind of permanent damage my mistress would never forgive me for. Her eye wouldn’t stop twitching though. I couldn’t stand to look at it. 

“Did she want me to kill her?”

She opened her mouth to say something in Swedish and I suddenly didn’t want to hear her answer.“I know I should have,” I blurted. “I know this is all my fault. I know, I know…” I turned away from her and towards the cupboard where she kept the little vial. I wanted to wipe the tears from my face but I didn’t want to make them more obvious than they already were. 

 “Jävla känslolös tik,” Sindar shook her head. I recognized the swearing but she didn’t seem to be cursing at me. “Did they tell you anything about your surgery? At your stable? Did she tell you anything?” 

My ports itched. They had explained it to me at the stable. How my surgery had gone wrong, how I could do things the rest of the kids couldn’t. But I hadn’t really understood it then. Murray, my first master, had broken it down into terms I could understand when he’d taught me how ports were supposed to work. My mistress had asked me once in passing to tell her if my cybernetics ever bothered me, but of course they hadn’t. My ports had been inactive for years by that point. 

“Fucking hypocrite,” Sindar swore. “Of course she fucking didn’t. Fucking irresponsible…” I turned back to glare at her and she actually shut her mouth mid-sentence. “Sorry, pojke, I’m sorry. Help me up.” She held out the gravity booster. I glared for a few more seconds but I felt much better once she was on her feet again, scribbling diagrams onto bits of scrap paper. 

“Ports are supposed to enable two-way communication – data out and data in – and provide an interface between your neural pathways and the extracranial wire matrix.” I knew this but I didn’t interrupt. She sounded just like my mistress giving me a lesson. “The ports installed in your brain are stolen prototypes of a line of wireless ports that would enable net users to log in without having to rely on the stupid skithög chairs.” She sighed and gestured towards her chair like it was a broken refrigerator stinking up the room. “It’s the chairs that cause most of the disconnect problems, not the ports themselves, no matter how many studies Eero’s damn chair company funds to blame my family’s port technology. The chairs suck up obscene amounts of electricity, they require cutaneous ports, they break down and need constant hardware upgrades and maintenance, and all these things attract attention and unnecessary risk." 

I walked away from her as she ranted about the chairs. She was stalling. I’d figured it out while she was talking, what she needed me for. What Eero was after. But I didn’t want to say it out loud any more than she did.I wanted to put as much space between her and myself as possible because she was going to say it and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being right about my mistress. I went all the way to the window and pressed my forehead against it, metal clicking softly against glass.  

“Your ports are trådlöstek. They are wireless. But the shitty install means you can’t experience two-way traffic. When you’re connected to the nets you experience data coming in, but none of your data comes out, so for you...”

“Stop," I choked. "I remember well enough what it felt like, I don't need you to describe it to me.” I wished she would call me pojke then, or some other sweet thing, so that I might have a reason to be angry at her. 

“Of course. If I was a good and righteous person, Jasten, I would have seen to it personally that the church set you up with parents and a life as far away from the net as possible. But instead, in my religious zeal, I made you my caretaker. Eero thinks he’s here for a flash drive or a password to a file, but it’s you he needs. I brought you here as a backup drive. The only person whose brain is capable of downloading and storing data from the sensanet without a chair. And, as if that isn’t enough, clearly I manipulated you into giving me your complete devotion along the way. Maybe I uploaded some filthy little love program into you while you were sleeping. I’ve done it before.”

“Stop, Sindar.” I didn’t mean to speak at all. I couldn’t take any more. I wanted Sindar gone. I wanted my mistress back. I wanted everything and everyone else gone. I wanted to be alone again.  

“It’s okay,” she soothed. “It’s almost over. I’ll tell you now what we’re going to do. I am going to write a will. Then I am going to do all the drugs I have left. And then if that doesn’t stop my heart you are going to administer the poison from that tiny vial your mistress gave you and you’re going to surrender yourself to the deprogrammers. They’ll make sure Eero and the church leave you alone.”

 

~ THIRTEEN ~ 

 

“Did I submit any paperwork to adopt you, Jasten? Eero and my father will contest the hell out of this will either way, so we’ll need to be as clear as possible. Better yet, did I have the foresight to write a will and leave it where you could find it?”

I ran my hand through my hair. I tried to make it seem casual, like I was trying to think of the answer to her question. But I was searching with my fingers for that one port near my neck which, when depressed, would power on my cybernetics. I had never pressed it myself, but I thought I remembered where Angelo had pressed. 

Part of me doubted that they would still work after more than six years. The recovery team spent months mapping my circuits and finally decided to just leave them inactive until I was old enough for corrective surgery. 

It wasn’t like I would be able to control them even if they did power back on. I’d never been able to control them. That had been the entire point. As Angelo and all the other Hollywood hacks never got tired of saying, there’s a niche for everything. My stable specialized in cutting-edge ‘mindfucks’ which were only barely legal in California. For a price, Angelo would let clients pour their data into us, let clients become us. But while most of the other kids shared their mental space and motor control with their customers my broken ports meant that I couldn’t share anything. I could receive, but I couldn’t send back any data of my own. People paid a premium for that. Extra if they wanted access to my motor cortex. I was the only kid in the stable who didn’t need a chair to access the sensanet, the only kid whose body you could take over and actually do something interesting with, if you had enough money to rent it from my guardians. I didn’t work that often. Not compared to the others. My price must have been obscene.  

I jumped when I felt her hand on my shoulder. 

She pulled her hand back and I was drowning in regret. I liked the feel of her hand on my shoulder. I liked holding her up. I liked being held by her, in that casual way. And I wasn’t angry at her anymore. As disgusted as she was with me and with herself, remembering the stables still only made me more grateful for my life with her and the church. I’d almost let her ruin that for me with her cynicism, but in the end I had faith in my mistress. This younger Sindar was lost in self-hatred and guilt. This Sindar didn’t really know the Provider’s light yet. Of course she would assume the worst about my relationship with my mistress. But I would prove her wrong. I would show her that my ports didn't work, that my mistress had adopted me out of kindness and service and faith, and not as a vault for tech secrets or out of a heretical gambit to cheat a deprogramming. 

Sindar held both her hands in tight fists at her sides, as if she were holding herself back from reaching out to lean on me. I watched her bow her head in the window's reflection. “It's almost over, pojke. I only need this one last bit of help. I'm not rich, but I do have a sizeable share in my family's company that pays our rent. You can sell it. I live off the interest, but Eero will give you his last nickel to own it and the man has mountains of nickels, so you’ll be in good shape. It's nothing, but it's yours if you'll help me with the will.”

“Top drawer of the desk, above the compressor,” I muttered. “But she left everything to the church.”

Sindar's smile was wretched. “The church of the Provider with a 35% percent stake in Papa's samlag port empire? What a vulgar fucking thing for me to have done.” She smiled and clapped her hands together. “Well at least I'll be able to forge the right signatures for the witnesses.”

She strode over to the desk and I started digging again into the ports just above my right ear, depressing each of them looking for one that might have some give. “Remind me of your full name, darling.”

“I don’t have one. I'm not even a legal person, Sindar.”

“Skitsnacket! That's a preposterous American law. No European country today would deny a boy personhood just because of the manner in which he happened to be born. I'm writing in here that you're a refugee from California, that I took over your care recently when your previous adoptive father died, and that I was looking for a French citizen who could adopt you permanently since I couldn't adopt you here as a Swedish citizen. Stress that I took you in as my child though – if the judge believes I bought you as my caretaker he might side with Eero against you. Oh, I wish I had shot the bastard dead. Then you’d get half of his money too. His family was rich before they decided to become the sensanet barons of the twenty-first century.” 

Her nervous, bubbly chatter made me suspicious that she'd already begun phase two of her plan to do all the drugs she had left while my back was turned. I kept depressing my ports, determined to try all thirty of them before I gave up. In ten minutes, give or take, we would pass the two hour mark and she’d be gone. I’d given up on getting any help from Sindar herself. I made agreeable sounds to keep her engrossed in her own stupid plan so that she wouldn’t disturb mine. 

"How about Jasten Priestly?” she trilled, and then snapped “Jävla helvete, Jasten.” Her voice was sinister now, like she had figured out how to hold a gravity booster to her voice box or something. “Stop that right fucking now. You will connect yourself to the sensanet wirelessly over my dead body. It is out of the question. Even if you could turn your interface on, you couldn't retrieve your mistress from the net without a connection of some kind. You’ll make yourself a vegetable for nothing.” 

I ignored her even though I was fairly sure she was right about my needing a wireless signal to have a hope of making a proper connection. But it didn't have to be a wireless connection to the sensanet. There were all kinds of doors to the net buried in the web and I was confident I could find one once I was online and could reach out to the church elders for help. I raised my other hand and started pressing the ports on my left side again, wondering if I was remembering it right and one of the ports was supposed to depress or whether I had to hold my finger over a flat port for five seconds to get the cybernetics to initialize. 

Sindar loomed behind me. I could see her in the window reflection. She could have reached out and yanked my hands away. She didn’t. “I know you feel helpless-”

I whirled to face her and blocked the hand reaching for my shoulder. "Because you're not letting me do anything! You said you would get her back and instead you’re trying to leave!" She looked down at her hand and smiled up at me with her one good eye. 

“You can try talking me into living deprogrammed if it will give you something to do. You’ll need to tell the heretics and the courts that you tried unless you want Eero to convince everyone you murdered me for my money. Give me your best pitch, pojke.” 

"You’re not funny.” I snarled, walking away from her towards the far corner of the room. “I’m not going to let her die and I’m not going to kill you. If I have to save her by myself then I will.”  

Her smile faltered and she swore a long low breath of Swedish that was too fast for me to parse. “I knew what I was signing up for. She knew what she was signing up for. We gave our consent.”  

“You’re not her! You have no idea what she wanted! She tried to get rid of *you*, and I can see why!”

“I wanted to die in the church, it says so in the will. I ordered the potassium chloride. We both have to honour my most recent wishes.” I tried to interrupt but she shook her head and spoke faster. “No, listen to me. I didn’t tell you the whole truth before. She’s already gone. She was gone before you reset the modem and brought me back. That’s what the binary code means, it means the hardware’s failed. No way to restore me from the backup.” She paused then. I wanted to scream. Why hadn’t she said? Why had she let me hope I’d get my mistress back? Had she thought I might not help her if I knew? Had she thought I might abandon her? Turn her over to Eero? To Interpol? 

I kept my back turned. Her voice was rough, the same timbre it was when my mistress got so fed up with the tactics of the vice merchants that she was no longer willing to spare their identities or their privacy in taking them down. “Please. There’s just a little ways more to fall. If you don’t want to help with that, that’s fine. It’s better. It’s what she would want.”

"Can't...” My voice broke as I watched her tense out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t move towards me but she glared until I couldn’t resist the compulsion to glance up at her. I wanted more time. I didn’t want to discuss wills and dosages. I didn’t want the end to come. 

I should have had faith. I should have turned away from Sindar and tried ever harder to save my mistress. I quaked instead. I had never felt further from the Provider. When Sindar had spoken binary it was like He had answered my prayer. But He hadn’t. I’d reset the router after our building’s wires had been cut, destroyed her hardware, and killed my mistress. And if I lost her body now I would have nothing left. “Can't you, whatever you are, can’t you make a new choice if my mistress is gone?" 

"I'm not Sindar, remember? I can’t make that kind of decision for her,” she said, shaking her head. She walked towards me.

“But you are,” I cried. Even to my own ears my voice sounded young. “I only said that because I was desperate. Of course you’re her. You’ve been here the whole time. You know everything about her.” I wiped my nose. 

“I only have access to the parts of her brain that don't require the cybernetics.” She said it gently. Patronizingly, yes, but with warmth. These were things I needed to hear to feel better about the situation, not things I needed to know to make me an effective missionary. She ran her thumb softly over the skin that overlapped the port at my left temple. “You had it right the first time, pojke. I’m the half that makes all the disastrous decisions. Decisions that make marrying Eero and taking up cocaine seem like venial sins.”

She brought her other hand to my cup my cheek. She whispered the next thing, her eyes wet and her voice thick “Apparently even at my holiest I was a slaving scumbag, pojke.” 

I jerked away, grabbing her by the wrists and shoving her arms down.  

“You weren't!” I shouted, shaking my head. “Stop it, stop pretending like you didn't care about me then, stop trying to make up for it now! Just stop pretending you’re doing me a big favour by dying! You’re not! I’m not going to be your excuse.”

She backed away and went back to writing the will like things had been settled. 

“I don’t want your money!” 

She ignored me and kept writing.

I'd never seriously entertained the idea of convincing the vulgar, cokeheaded, weirdly affectionate Sindar to stay permanently. She was just another more troublesome version of Sindar's body in the chair - a Sindar I needed to shepherd and take care of until my mistress came back.

I thought of David then, and why he'd let me come up here on my own. Didn’t they know Sindar might try to finish the job I’d botched? Did they really expect me to stop her? To convince her to go clean to spare my feelings? I barely knew my mistress for all that we’d lived in this tiny apartment together for years. I had known this Sindar for less than three hours.  

 “Your sister is here. Agnes. I saw her downstairs. She cried whenever anyone mentioned that you might be hurt. She cares about you. She needs you.” 

Sindar's face darkened with rage. She stood and paced from the table to the front door, to the table, and back, and then with a choked yell she pulled out the gravity disrupter and brought her fist down hard on her one-of-a -kind sensanet chair, cracking it in two and laying waste to each half in turn. 

"Stop," I protested weakly. I took a few abortive steps towards her and thought better of it. She was crazy. She was absolutely crazy. I couldn’t think of anything poor Agnes could have done to deserve such anger when Sindar laughed devils like Eero off.  

Meanwhile my eyes were losing focus. Colours were fading. Shapes were losing their definition. It was slow, slower even than the boot-up of my first master's ancient workstation. But I recognized it as a slow boot-up nonetheless. At some point while manhandling myself I had found my cyborg on-switch.

 

~ FOURTEEN ~ 

 

My ears were picking up something akin to static, but it was soft – chatter and whispers. Not in a language I could parse, or perhaps the speakers were speaking too quickly. My eyes struggled to focus on Sindar's rampage in the distance as numbers and symbols and images flashed very, very close. My arms felt heavy and foreign. 

Sindar was kneeling on the ground now. I could see her chest heaving through the flutter of her shirt. I heard the gravity disrupter fall and roll away. I couldn’t see her face but her hands were still clenched. It terrified me to see her undone like that. I turned away, back to the window. 

If I could get my mistress back it would be fine. The dark, violent, inappropriately affectionate Sindar would lie dormant and numbed. There were still a few minutes left. My mistress was still backed up on the server. The church was full of scientists. They would fix whatever hardware had been damaged. It would all be fine. Once I was online, once I could pray to the Provider for real, in code he could see, he would answer me and help me save her.  

I stared out the window, waiting for the symbols I was seeing to make some sort of sense. I still needed a wireless signal. A phone, a satellite, anything would do. 

"Tell me how to get online, Sindar." 

"We’re playing right into her hand.”

 I couldn’t see her face through the swirl of characters but I could hear her voice. She sounded exhausted. “I'm what’s left of your mistress,” she gritted. “You want to help her? Bring me the potassium chloride." 

"No!” 

"It's what I want. This is my decision. I won’t let her take this from me.” 

“My cybernetics are on. It’s not too late.” 

“Idiot fucking clone whore with your big stupid eyes and your pouty lips, staring at me like I’m your entire fucking universe. Do what I bought you to do. Do it, J-10. You want your mistress back so bad? You should follow her fucking orders!”

I couldn't believe I was hearing her correctly at first, because the static had grown louder and her accent was thick, and she’d said a lot of horrible things about me but she’d never called me a clone to my face or used my stable id tag before. And I wondered if she thought that pissing me off would make me comply for a minute, until the symbols cleared enough for me to notice that her mouth was moving out of synch with the sound of her voice, words forming before I heard them and sound trailing after her lips were still. Were my cybernetics… translating? 

I was horrified and exasperated that I'd had working translation software installed in my brain all this time. I'd spent the past years struggling to learn basic coding languages. 

“Don’t make me do this,” she was muttering in Swedish. “Agnes du jävla fitta gör inte mig att göra det här, don’t make me do this, don’t make me do this, I won’t.” I heard the Swedish when I listened for it but there was the English following right after. 

I moved a hand up in front of my eyes, instinctively trying to bat away the symbols, and to my surprise it worked. It was like wiping steam off a window. 

Sindar was looking into her bedroom, eyes red and swollen. She swayed in the ruins of the chair, scanning around her for un-destroyed equipment. She walked on unsteady feet to the medicine cabinet and I bounded after her, faster, and grabbed the potassium chloride. She scratched me and screamed and my cybernetics translated a string of highly impressionistic threats, but I slipped away. 

I almost tripped over the cylindrical gravity disruptor on the floor but then I thought better and turned back to snatch it up too before she could do more damage. Sindar was coming after me like a crazed animal and I didn't have anywhere to run but back to the window. With the gravity disruptor pulsing in my hand I slammed my fist into the window, punched a small hole through the 3-inch thick glass, and threw the potassium chloride out into the air. 

Sindar collided into me, crushing my wrist against the edge of the glass with so much force that the gravity disrupter slipped and fell down my sleeve. She backed off me as I scrambled. But then she charged me again, checking my entire body into the window. The gravity disruptor was in my shirt, trapped near my chest. And she was grinding into me from behind, picking up its effects, trying to smash the window with our combined mass like I was some kind of battering ram. 

I tried to slip away but she was crushing me and I couldn't see straight for all the symbols reflecting off the glass. The noise in my ears amplified and there was a sharp, metallic taste now on my tongue. The window was beginning to crack. I needed to turn around and hit her with the disruptor, needed to make her stop. I needed the doctor and David to come in and take Sindar to whatever rehab or mental institution or prison facility they had waiting. I needed help. 

I thought of my mistress. Was there any time left? Maybe Sindar and the doctor were wrong. Maybe there was eternal life in the sensanet, for those who believed. I sent a silent prayer of thanks to the Provider asked him to forgive me for what had been all in all a very blasphemous day. If my translation software was working, I reasoned, there must be a tiny bit of internet available to me. In fact, as Sindar ground me into the glass with her shoulder some of the symbols were starting to appear a little more clearly. IP, for instance, followed by a string of numbers. Key. I focused my eyes on the key and to my surprise it responded, becoming brighter as all the other symbols started to dim. 

I didn't have a joystick or mouse pad like the one installed into Sindar's chair. I tried to think of numbers and letters but nothing happened. Then I remembered the steam clearing trick and tried tracing numbers out into the glass just under where the key symbol appeared. I simultaneously wondered if I was really condemning myself to death chasing an internet connection when I needed to be fighting for my life. Off in the distance something flashing and red caught my attention. 

It was my friend, the boy in the tower across from me. He, quite rightly, was signalling me to ask if everything was alright and should he call building security or the police. He was holding up a tablet.And as my eyes locked on to him and his tablet bright symbols blossomed in my vision. Another internet connection, a strong one. I just needed a key. 

I spelled it out in sign language - need internet key now. Sindar, behind me, was weakening but so was the glass in front of me. He stared at me in confused shock. I spelled internet key in sign language. And finally with a shake of his head he scribbled something onto his tablet and held it up to the window. Shining in bold red letters I read “BENOIT”, the name of his dog. Looking at the letters, lining them up with the 'key' image, sent sparks of bright yellow light through my field of vision. I could smell sulfur and ozone. I lost track of my arms and legs entirely. The static overpowered everything else and behind that there were loud, distant booms like explosions or thunder. 

 

 

~ FIFTEEN ~

 

And then there was just the internet. 

The Google homepage, to be precise. Bright, primary colours. 

I was automatically shunted to one of the para-sensanet social networking platforms — the default gateway for users trying to browse the web from their sensanet chairs instead of their computers. Small cubicles stretched out in long narrow rows, each storing an avatar not currently in use. Millions of them, I knew, though of course I couldn't see to the end of any single row. 

I wandered for a while – impossible to say how long – and wondered what the hell I'd expected to happen. I’d never been on the World Wide Web with my ports before; I’d only ever been on the stable’s private network. I hadn’t been able to send data then, and I wasn’t able to send any now. I could receive, which meant I could see and hear everything, but I couldn’t interact. It was like trying to code with a non-touchscreen and no keyboard. I tried to enter search terms and talk to the friendly advertiser avatars, who stood there with digital smiles but didn't come to life as I walked by. 

I waited. Maybe another avatar would activate and I could follow it out? I hovered by the door. At first I sang hymns to try to attract attention. Then I started explaining my predicament loudly in case someone in the church was monitoring the social network looking for potential converts. Then I started praying to the Provider for mercy. And then I was silent. I accepted my fate and went to sleep. I'd done all I could with what little I'd been given. If the Provider saw fit to spare me I would be spared. If he saw fit to release me I would be released. I felt horribly sorry for myself at first, but eventually that faded and I just became grateful and covetous of the memories I had of my body - how glorious it had been to be in the sunshine in California, and run outside with the other J clones through the grass when they let us out onto the grounds to play, and how warm it had felt to have Sindar clutch my shoulder and call me boy, and how beautiful certain bits of the Bible were when my mistress read them aloud with her Swedish accent. 

When my mistress did come for me, she had to shake me awake and call my name several times before I could respond. 

I blinked up at her, confused about where I was. Her avatar was so much warmer than the tingling absence of the non-floor I was non-sleeping on.My avatar skin protested at the contact and I drew away. It prickled, pins and needles. It hurt as she put her arms around my middle, under my arms, and lifted me to my feet.

It didn't seem possible for her to be so strong. She was still her thin self. But she was radiant. Her avatar was a full three-dimensional rendering of her form, and the colour and detail betrayed not a hint of pixilation. She was easily more vivid then than she had been in life. Her dark skin gleamed and her long, flowing white dress glittered brighter than anything I’d seen, simultaneously producing and reflecting light. Her shining dark curls fell past her shoulders and covered her ports. Her satiny lips stretched in a warm smile as she held me propped up against her. My eyelids slid shut again. 

“Come on, Jasten. I know you’re more resilient than this.” She pulled me over to the exit. I could barely keep myself upright but it was only a few steps away. “Now. Just press the log off button. You can do it with your eye if you can't move your hand. Go on. Focus on it and apply some pressure.” 

“Sindar?” I croaked. She smiled sadly, like this was a test and I’d given her the wrong answer.

“Yes, Jasten. I'm here to help you. Focus on the button.”

“Mistress,” I blurted, still staring into her face, because I recognized her smile now and could see in her eyes all of the conversations she was deliberately not having with me because I was her apprentice and needed to learn to figure things out for myself using what she had taught me. 

My mistress held me tighter to her chest, propping me up against her form like I weighed nothing, which I supposed I didn't, despite how heavy I felt. “Focus, Jasten. The button will open the door.” 

“I can't. My ports... they don't work. I can receive but I can't send anything out.” 

“That was perhaps true when you were a child but your brain has had years to develop and adapt to your cybernetics. For most people the cybernetics will always be a secondary system overlaid on a primary system formed in childhood but for you, there is no distinction between primary and secondary system. If wireless ports are ever going to work, they’re going to have to be installed when a user still had a great degree of brain plasticity so that the biological motor cortex learns to accept and control the interface without external devices. They’ll work if you concentrate hard enough.” 

I slumped back down and she sank down with me, supporting me while resting on her knees. “So my ports aren’t broken. I am just your backup drive. Some kind of trådlöstek prototype you were working on.”

"No, oh no. Who told you that?” 

“*You* did.” 

“Of course. Listen. You can’t trust her. Me. She’s the one who invented that port technology. She tested it on kids long before she tested it on clones. I couldn’t live with it anymore but I couldn’t just turn my back on you when we found out the Hollywood hacks were using my stolen tech on you. Jasten, I was going to do your corrective surgery. ” 

 what your surgeons did was reprehensible and I would never – I took you into my home because I had been a researcher, yes, but the wards and I agreed that I should be your guardian because it was my prototypes the hacks stole and I was in the best position to oversee your corrective surgery when you came of age. And… and of course I wanted to make personal restitution to you for all that you and the clones that didn’t survive the installation suffered, to make sure that your suffering advanced science and not commercial gain. I should have explained it to you years ago. I wanted you to enjoy what you had left of your childhood first, and then I waited too long.”  

And I remembered the two hour time limit, and all the other reasons she couldn’t really be here with me. “Are you really here? Did I save you?”  

She put her palm against my cheek and smiled. “You will. Focus on the door ahead. We'll press the button together." 

She lifted my fingers in hers and reached over for the button, which shifted down to where she could reach it. “Wait,” I struggled. “Wait, what will happen to you?” 

“The Provider takes care of me.”

The button's blue glow flashed as our fingers brushed it. The door slid open and sucked me through. I went from feeling heavy to feeling weightless, like I was free falling at a great speed. I couldn't make out anything around me; most of it was black and sparkling, like travelling through a dark night sky at the velocity of a shooting star. Like Lucifer cast down from Heaven.

The snapback was shattering. My teeth rattled. My bowels shuddered. Going from having no teeth and bowels to having teeth and bowels again in less than an instant was bruising. As the static died down the pulsing tones in my ears grew louder as if to compensate. 

Above me, when the clamour of binary code finally faded enough for me to focus, I could make out two smiling faces, both of which belonged to Sindar. I smiled back at them while they muttered Swedish endearments and ran their hands over my arms and face in relief. I lay back, exhausted but elated. I’d done it. I’d saved them. And then, when a bit more of my brain had come back online, I noticed that one of the Sindars had blonde hair and I realized that it was Agnes I was staring at, Sindar's sister, and not my mistress. She and I both cried.

 

 

 

~ SIXTEEN ~

 

Sindar came back into the room later, after they'd cleaned me, fed me, and given me something to help me sleep. She ruffled my hair but I wasn't quite out of it enough not to realize that she was depressing each of my ports, looking for my off switch. 

“Don't,” I said as strongly as I could. “I mean it, Sindar. No.”

“Fine, pojke. Go back to sleep.” She sat on my bed, which was actually my mistress’s bed in the apartment’s single bedroom. She stared out the window. Or possibly at the vase that had once held her cocaine. 

“I saw her,” I said sleepily. “She was online.”

She smiled without looking even slightly happy. “Did you? The internet's still out in our building. My deprogrammers have been in the control room for the past three days trying to repair it.”

"You're still alive on the other side." 

She put her hand on my head. “Go back to sleep.” 

“Sindar, what's going to happen now?”

“You’re going to rest.”

“No, you know what I mean. What’s going to happen to you?” 

“My father is dead, so that’s good news. I’m a millionaire again with large shares in my father’s port-tech empire. The bad news is that with the old bastard in the grave, my sister decided to lift the ban on contact with me and fund my ‘rescue’. So it was a private deprogramming, not an Interpol investigation. Nevertheless, when your friend across the way called the police they called Interpol when they found the chair, so I will have to face trial. I did inherit the family lawyers, though, and they’re already brokering a deal. If I agree to treatment it’ll be fifteen months in prison at the most.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. She sounded exhausted.

She turned back to me. “Anyway, you’ll be fine so long as you stay off the internet. And you’ll barely notice I’m gone, I promise you. I’ll send you to Lapland on vacation. You'll love it there. Nothing but sunshine. Unless you’d actually prefer to go to California?” 

“What about the church?”

“They’ll have to settle for the benefits they’ll derive from my services as a regular old port developer, I'm afraid. Interpol will watch me now so I can’t contact anyone in the church without putting them at risk. All my information about the church is seven years out of date, so I’m not much interest as a witness, but I might have to testify against Murray’s estate to secure your position as my heir.” 

She ran her thumb gently across one of the ports near my temple. And, as if it had only now crossed her mind: “you’ll still be welcome in the church of course. There will elders fighting each other to snap you up. Say the word and I’ll make it happen. No reason for us both to be crippled and useless.” 

I laughed at that. "We both did fairly well for cripples." And she winced. I didn't so much see it in the darkness as I felt it in the way her hand tensed. “I guess I have no right to say that to you,” I offered, closing my eyes, “I didn't save you when you needed saving and I didn't kill you when you needed killing. I wasn't a very good caretaker.”

She ruffled my hair for a long minute without saying anything. “You made me want to take care of myself,” she whispered, “and that’s something no one else was ever able to do. Now go to sleep.” 

She strode towards the doorway with the same speed and arrogant haste I recognized as biological Sindar’s. And I wondered: if I'd fallen through the door after my mistress pressed the exit button, then where had my mistress ended up? Was she still on the web somewhere? The net? Had it all been some kind of delusion? Or a dream I’d had while sleeping online?  

Had I even gotten online at all? What proof did I really have that the white space was the web?

And as I closed my eyes and relaxed into the drugs which were keeping the pain from my considerable bruises and strained muscles at a distance, and I heard it through just the slightest bit of static. 

Leverantören tar hand om mig, my mistress whispered. And this time there was no translation delay, none at all. I understood it in Swedish and discovered a whole pocket of Swedish in my brain that hadn’t been accessible to me before. Not translation software, not a host of useful phrases in many languages, just Swedish. A lifetime’s worth. I heard it again. Leverantören tar hand om mig. The Provider Takes Care of Me. And I believed her.

 

 


End file.
